Jay Baer, New York Times bestselling author of Youtility, is back with another bombshell: Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers. Jay spent 23 years in digital marketing, consulting for more than 700 companies during that period, including 32 of the FORTUNE 500.

His current firm–Convince & Convert–provides digital marketing advice and online customer service advice and counsel to some of the world’s most important brands like The United Nations, Allstate, Cisco, and Cabela’s.

A fixture in social media, Jay is the most retweeted person in the world among digital marketers, and the second most retweeted person in the world among B2B marketers. He is also an active venture capitalist, and is an investor or advisor to 15 early stage technology and social media companies.

Jay tells us how to hug our haters and keep our customers, on this episode of Revenue Chat.

=Highlights=

• 03:14 Jay Baer started in politics as a political consultant.
• 04:24 Started to market a new internet site as a VP, but not knowing what the internet was.
• 06:12 What do you mean by ‘customer service is a spectator sport’?
• 07:00 About 40% of all customer complaints are now in public forums & social media.
• 07:35 What social media channel receives the most complaints?
• 08:42 How does that correlate with businesses that service and cater to the public?
• 09:00 Research found 1/3 of customer service complaints are never answered!
• 11:03 About 50% of the time, people who complain in social media, expect a response from businesses.
• 11:41 If a business did this, it would blow your mind and win your heart.
• 12:05 This has a massive impact on customer loyalty.
• 12:55 How does the customer service budget correlate with the Hatrix infographic?
• 13:14 Everybody listening to Revenue Chat knows it makes more business sense to do this but we don’t run our business that way.
• 14:43 Now that every customer has a megaphone, everybody knows if you are great or terrible with customer service.
• 15:16 Is there an estimated amount of budget ideal for businesses to invest in their customer service budget?
• 17:01 Beefing up the budget is a personnel cost more than anything else.
• 17:25 How Discover Card set themselves apart despite heady competitors and updated their brand as a result doing this.
• 20:48 The results are not only amazing as regards customer retention, but provable.
• 22:04 This one simple fact guarantees increased customer retention.
• 23:10 Research shows in most cases you don’t have to solve the problem. This one action keeps 70% of your customers.
• 23:32 This is the only time a company should not respond to a complaint.
• 25:04 Shocking info: 80% of companies say they deliver exceptional customer service. But the truth is …
• 27:21 In the new Customer Service realm you get massive credit for doing a good job and little credit for …
• 27:32 Details about the Hatrix infographic and significant points about it such as on and offstage haters …
• 28:14 CEOs and Customer Service: Just look at this and you will find holes you need to plug right away
• 29:16 What can businesses do to proactively keep their customers …
• 30:35 If you want to be better at business, you want complaints and why …
• 30:54 You need to treat this category as your most important customer instead of the least important customer and why …
• 32:00 About Le Pain Quotidian bakery/cafe chain and Erin Pepper who wanted to triple the number of complaints and why.
• 35:43 About the KeepYourCustomersCourse.com – the course version of the book.
• 37:14 Future plans and visions of Jay Baer and making businesses better.

Jay Baer provides compelling and irrefutable intelligence on why you must seek out all possible customers who are not 100% thrilled with your products and services. Brilliant. Insightful. Astute.