Book Review: Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers

A couple of years ago, I sat down with a number of business owners and showed them all the different sites I knew about where customers could leave comments. It was an eye-opening experience for many of them. However, many of them indicated they were too busy to focus on these sites. After reading Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, they need to strongly reconsider. Every business owner needs to read this book.

In 219 pages, Baer shares a wealth of research about why it is important to acknowledge and respond to even your most harshest critic. Baer set out to research how the proliferation of social media platforms has affected customer service. He also researched the consequences for not engaging in this arena. He addressed this research across eight chapters:

• Why you should embrace complaints
• The two types of haters and the DNA of complaints
• The Hatrix: Who complains, where, and why
• Customer service is a spectator sport
• Big buts: 5 obstacles to providing great service
• H-O-U-R-S: The playbook for hugging offstage haters
• F-E-A-R-S: The playbook for Hugging onstage haters
• The future of customer service

The reality is that no company will get it right every time. This opens up an opportunity to complain. How you address the complaint is essential to your reputation. According to Baer, addressing the complaint in a timely manner with empathy will raise your reputation and customer advocacy whereas failing to respond to a complaint will lower it… significantly. As Baer noted,

“Haters are not your problem… Ignoring them is.”

By engaging with your customers, both good and bad, you can increase customer advocacy. Additionally, you can gather valuable information to help your business. It is important to know what is wrong so that you can fix it. Not many businesses are addressing complaints well, this provides an opportunity to stand out.

Baer shared key points regarding your “haters”:

• Offstage haters (use telephone and email) want an answer.
• Onstage haters (use social media, forums, etc) want an audience.
• If offstage haters’ concerns are not addressed, they may migrate to being onstage haters.
• If the complaint is in a social media environment, the public is interested in how the complaint is being resolved. It is therefore important to stay in the channel where the complaint was initiated.

Baer stressed the importance of not ignoring complaints and addressing them promptly. Every business owner should read Hug Your Haters. Simply ignoring what is happening on social media will not help your business, and may in fact, harm your business due to what is perceived as an “uncaring” attitude.

If you are unsure how to track what is said about your business, feel free to contact me. I can help you search and set up listening posts.

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