1-Sentence-Summary: Hug Your Haters talks about the importance of acknowledging your haters or dissatisfied customers and valuing their opinion in the process of building better products, improving the existing offerings, and growing your strategies overall.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
Negative reviews, angry customers, haters on social media – they all have one thing in common: they don’t like you. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you know how to deal with it, and if you do it fast before the lousy word spreads in the community.
If treated right, negative feedback is often a highly valuable asset in the process of building improved offerings. Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer teaches you how to turn your dissatisfied clientele into happy customers or even advocates for your brand by valuing their feedback. It all starts with stellar customer service and consistency over a sustained period of time.
Without further ado, let’s talk about the three most important lessons from the book:
- Embracing negative feedback properly can increase your profits.
- The H.O.U.R.S. formula is a winning strategy for dealing with negative reviews.
- If you want to win the hearts of your customers again, use the F.E.A.R. method
Lesson 1: Recurrent buyers are responsible for the majority of your profits, so taking in their feedback is a must.
Attracting new customers is a difficult road to take, but there are better options out there once you have a stable customer base: retaining them. The book suggests that by keeping even a small percentage of your customers loyal to you, profits can grow as much as 85% – now that’s a great business strategy!
Retaining loyal audiences is also much easier than acquiring new prospects, but it all comes with a catch – stellar customer service. When you offer better options, support, and products than your competition, chances are that the market will notice that and stick with you.
To become the go-to choice for people, you’ll have to continuously improve and work on the negative feedback. Receiving criticism can be tough, but if you acknowledge it, let your customers know that you’re actively working towards remediating it, and offer them support or even benefits like discounts or free-of-charge products, you’ll surely get through any situation successfully.
What’s also particularly important is to embrace negative feedback, instead of hiding it. Publicly remediation situations can grow your reliability and foster a good reputation. Then, chances are your customers will stay loyal to your brand and not migrate to other options that put more care and thought into their customers.
Lesson 2: Use the H.O.U.R.S. method to address complaints and negative feedback.
Now that we’ve understood the importance of accepting negative feedback and treating it as valuable input for your company, let’s go through some of the ways you can use it to address these complaints and concerns.
The author calls for the HOURS method, which stands for:
- (Be) Human – get personal with your dissatisfied customers and tailor your response to their concerns. Treat them as human beings with distinctive personality traits, not just data sources.
- (Use) One channel – don’t forward their complaints and pass them around. Don’t refer them to someone else, a FAQ channel, or anything at all. Simply fix their issue.
- Unify data – get all the information you need to act upon their request and resolve it immediately.
- Resolve – act quickly and fix the negative occurrence properly, not just to get it off of your chest, but to make it better for the customer.
- Speed – treat problems with a sense of urgency and fix them quickly.
Compile these solutions into a fully integrated method by discussing with your team and finding a procedure that you can implement together. Make sure each member receives training so that you’re all on the same page and that you set up a written procedure in place ready to go when such complaints occur.
Lesson 3: If you want to win the hearts of your customers again, use the F.E.A.R. method.
Customers want to know that you’re willing to make sacrifices for their sake. By taking on the responsibility of improving their satisfaction, you’ll be showing them that they’re worth your time, which can make all the difference between a world-class experience and just another day at the office.
With the F.E.A.R method, you can easily spot, fix, and improve your public negative feedback in a timely manner. Here’s how to use it:
- Find the public complaints on the internet through apps like Google Alerts or Mention.net to know where to start your quest of fixing complaints.
- Empathize with your customers by asking yourself how would you like to have this problem solved.
- Answer publicly so that you also build your reputation in the process.
- Reply once, and keep the thread short. More answers don’t necessarily provide added benefits; sometimes, they can spark an unnecessary conflict.
- Switch channels if the situation asks for you to protect your client’s privacy. If the problem is serious or personal, it’s best to readdress them via email.
Lastly, it’s best to keep an open eye on all reviews and be present when it comes to listening to your customers. Take care of your customers and always treat them well. These methods for handling customer service complaints will help you win new customers and keep the ones you have.
Hug Your Haters Review
Hug Your Haters will keep your mind organized and help you identify ways to improve your customer-company interaction. It’s written in a way that’s easy to understand, and can be used by anyone.
The methods outlined in this book can help shape your thinking when it comes to dealing with customer feedback, both online and offline.
Bookmark this summary and remember our three simple steps before you give up too quickly. You might just find that Hug Your Haters is the nudge you need to begin improving your customer service.
Who would I recommend the Hug Your Haters summary to?
The 30-year-old small business owner who wants to improve customer retention, the 40-year-old hospitality manager who wants to enhance their customer service in the company, or the 23-year-old person who’s working in
Last Updated on October 6, 2022
