Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

The Ethical Corporation reported on a study recently and this is what they had to say concerning word-of-mouth and experience:

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“For the first time, Harris and the Reputation Institute examined the effect of word-of-mouth communication on corporate reputations and found it strongly influences people’s assessment of companies and their subsequent buying intentions. Only personal experience was more likely to shape a consumer’s perceptions of a company’s reputation, the sponsors report.”

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When the above statement it is very profound in dealing with an issue that confronts a company from time to time; how to handle unfair statements made that don’t add up to the reality happening within your company.

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Have you ever had unfair comments by customers that can be classified as nothing other than a lie? I have not only seen it happen with others but also experienced it myself.

I have had customer’s outright lie about a situation and then spread the lie as if it had really happened. How do you handle a situation like that?

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First of all, there is no way you’re going to win an argument if you start fighting back verbally and try to reason with them. In this very difficult cases, usually there is another motive by a consumer other than what is really being discussed.

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Once I had someone bring back several thousand dollars of merchandise to get a refund. Only upon checking out the merchandise to find out that we didn’t even sell that particular product; of course we couldn’t give the refund. The individual didn’t like it and starting making a scene in front of a lot of people. We still didn’t offer to give the money, and it enraged them more. Eventually we began to hear stories told by this person about what we did to them and how bad we treated them.

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The reason I am mentioning this and how I am tying it in to the original statement above is that there is a way that you can be poor word-of-mouth statements, and that is by the actual experience that you give to the customers. If someone says one thing, and the employees really do something different, it will eventually come out.

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Here is the key to it all: Your company reputation can never be about how you spin things. It is all about blending what the company really is and how it serves the customer with how people really think about you.

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If a company takes an unfair public hit, it may suffer some in the short-term, but in the long-term, who you really are will be what people will believe about you.