Over the last few months I’ve been wit­ness to the demise of a client’s busi­ness purely because of neg­at­ive chat­ter on the web.

If you run your own busi­ness you’ll be acutely aware that a pos­it­ive word-of-mouth endorse­ment for your com­pany or its products is worth its weight in gold when it comes to gen­er­at­ing a sale.

Con­versely if your busi­ness gets things wrong and more import­antly, con­tin­ues to get them wrong; then news of those neg­at­ive cus­tomer exper­i­ences will quickly spread and before you know it; you’ve got your­self a bad reputation.

Trust in your com­pany or product begins to wain and before you know it you’re into “fire fight­ing mode” with sales going down quicker than Bobby Crush on an oil-rig.

Word of Mouth Marketing

In the days of over the fence gos­sip, a bad repu­ta­tion was rel­at­ively easy to con­tain. You simply moved your busi­ness to the next town out of ear-shot.

Then some bright spark inven­ted the print­ing press, then the radio, tele­phone, TV and even­tu­ally the Inter­net. So what we have today is the means for people to tell other people around the world en-mass, their good and bad news stor­ies about par­tic­u­lar com­pany or product. That’s why com­pan­ies tremble at the neg­at­ive expos­ure on con­sumer TV pro­grammes such as the BBC’s Watch­dog and their like can bring but con­versely, love the ‘buzz’ that the inter­net can gen­er­ate about their products.

You know all this I’m sure. How­ever when you see its impact on a busi­ness first hand, then it brings home the power that the medium of the web, par­tic­u­larly when blogs and web­sites such as Twit­ter and Face­book are thrown into the mix, can have on a business.

Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword

In my real-life example, the cli­ent was an online retailer of fur­niture which sold its products purely through its web­site. After being in busi­ness for a couple of years they had built their turnover to about £1M and were prof­it­able, which isn’t bad for a small com­pany of less than 10 people. They even included some fam­ous cli­ents amongst their reg­u­lar shop­pers and enjoyed some good expos­ure through the TV make-over shows as a result.

All seemed to be going swim­mingly; their exist­ing web­site had some faults, but noth­ing that couldn’t be fixed with a refresh (which is where I came into the pic­ture with a strategy for an improved web­site and online mar­ket­ing cam­paign). Added to this they had plans to expand into their own premises with a lar­ger warehouse.

How­ever some­where along the line, inde­pend­ent of their web­site, things star­ted to go wrong. Cus­tom­ers star­ted to suf­fer from late deliv­er­ies, faulty products, poor com­mu­nic­a­tion and at the end; money being taken without orders being fulfilled.

Oh dear! Trouble at’Mill!

Now I wasn’t privy to the whole story; this post is based solely upon my obser­va­tions. How­ever what I did pick-up on was the increas­ing level of neg­at­ive chat­ter about the com­pany amongst con­sumer for­ums and blogs.

Clearly there were some very unhappy people out there who wished to vent their anger.

This sort of bad mouth­ing soon star­ted to snow­ball and couldn’t be eas­ily over­come to such an extent that it began to impact upon the client’s abil­ity to pro­mote their web­site in the search engines. Any search for the com­pany not only brought-up ref­er­ences to their web­site, but also the neg­at­ive com­ments from their unhappy customers.

Shred­ded

Even­tu­ally the client’s repu­ta­tion was in tat­ters by the very medium that they had used to build their busi­ness with in the first place and their busi­ness had to fold.

A sad situ­ation for both their cus­tom­ers and the two dir­ect­ors of the com­pany involved, who I had grown fond of over the pre­ced­ing months!

Get your Back-end Right

So the les­son of the day in this post is: “Get your back-end right.”

By this I mean it’s not good enough just to have a swanky web­site with all the bells and whistles if you’re an online retailer. You need to get the cus­tomer ser­vice ele­ments right as well behind the scenes by mak­ing sure your cus­tom­ers trust your com­pany and its website.

This is done through quick order ful­fil­ment, qual­ity products and good cus­tomer com­mu­nic­a­tions. Get these bits wrong and… well! You know the rest!

Here endeth the lesson

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