LessThanHumble.com

I love having angry customers. That’s not to say that I love making my customers angry, but I love having the opportunity to please an angry customer. For easy reference, difficult customers are referred to as angry customers.

Anyone who runs a website, that sells some sort of product, service, or other goods, or doesn’t even sell anything tangible or monetized, at one time or another have run into or will eventually run into a angry customer. Unfortunately you can’t please everyone, and it’s hard to even know when a customer is not pleased (far worse than angry, in my opinion). The great thing about this is though, angry customers are gold mines-literal jackpots of potential overflowing satisfaction. 

With the state of today’s “Internet”, you’re customers are physically disconnected from you. They can’t see the faces of your sales team, let alone hear their tone, or even see their facial expressions. This makes it hard to show a customer that a) you value their business (words can only do so much) and b) and respond with feedback that pleases them. Therefore, any opportunity that you have to deal with a customer should not only be a time to up sell (up sell up sell up sell – a great motto to run your business by) but it should also be the time to receive appropriate feedback. Here’s where you’ll start to uncover the angry customers, unless the particular person is already irate and obnoxious. In either case, you’re set..

What do I do with an angry customer? 
It’s simple, please them. This doesn’t mean that you have to give into their desires if it is less beneficial for you. It means showing them why something is the way it is, giving proper explanations, and sincerely apologizing when something has been done wrong on your part (or even if the customer perceives a wrong doing). Anyone could write on and on about how to please a customer exactly, but basically show them that you care about them, their business, and what they think. Now turn them 360 degrees around, continue to listen and work their frustrations out of them. This could take 30 seconds or 30 minutes, but give it time. Once the frustration is worked out, continue to work the customer to make sure that they got all of their problems sorted out, through whatever means. Once the customer has released their frustrations, make sure they “smile” (and you “smile”) whatever way you can. Obviously if this is on the Internet (through text-based communications), the only way to do it is to word things properly as to make them extremely friendly, but in person just smile (and mean it), and over the phone lighten the conversation so that they leave on a good note. Now you’re ready for the next step, how to turn your happy-customer-converts into evangelists for your business.

How do I get my angry customers who’ve turned happy to tell other people? 
You’ve basically already done it, because it’s is all about making sure that the customer is happy beyond their expectations and making them aware of their happiness (though don’t bring it to their direct attention). People generally love to brag, so this isn’t really all that complicated, once a customer is happy beyond their initial expectations, most are going to go off and tell their friends “so and so did X for me, you should really take a look at their business.”
Now I realize that not all customers can be pleased, and not all customers can be turned into evangelists, but if played properly 9/10 can become jackpots of overflowing satisfaction. It’s an art that takes time to learn, and years to perfect, but the key point in all of this is knowing what the customer wants, and being able to understand and analyze their non-verbal (or even verbal) responses.

On a side note, there’s a great book I read a while ago that follows this subject: Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force