How a Negative Review Changed My Business Approach

 

First, let me describe the context:
- how I multiplied $5000 about 75x in less than a year and exceeded $1 million in business turnover during the same period.
Well, the gain was slightly higher (and here I'm speaking strictly about profit) because, throughout this entire period, I also had consistent monthly payments.

The product?
Silicone shoelaces.
I have a good friend (Denis) in Vadu, Constanța, Romania who, ever since he found out what I do, introduces me everywhere as the "shoelace guy", along with the associated story. 🙂

The shoelace thing was a coincidence, like most of our meteoric journey. But we worked, oh boy, how we worked during this entire period.

After selling the apartment I was living in at the time, I decided it was time to put the money to work. I no longer enjoyed what I was doing - event photography was draining my brain and physical health (long story, to be saved for another post). Sponsored ads kept appearing for various methods of making money online. For the gullible, it sounded appetizing.

I knew it was possible, but I wasn't so "gullible" as to imagine you could do this just by spending some money somewhere without putting in the work. Some were gullible and are still crying. Or better said, they complain about being scammed and vent their frustration on those who sold them the "make money online" course. 🙂

I had known about Amazon for some time. I was fascinated by this new type of commerce and the fact that the platform was so "disruptive" that I don't believe there has been such a business growth opportunity in human economic history. I had listened to some podcasts, and during that period, the principle still worked that if you had many reviews and most were good, you could grow overnight, to the detriment of already established businesses or brands.

Pay attention, I'm talking about the impulse given only by reviews. It was a time when traditional businesses were scared if you told them a customer might be dissatisfied, they could post their dissatisfaction (ironically, on the business's page), and that all other potential customers could read what disappointed them.

Of course, customer loyalty was known and its impact understood, but it didn't matter as much when the customer pool was practically almost infinite and when a dissatisfied customer could easily get lost in the crowd without too much damage.

During this period, I received a phone call from a good friend from college, with whom I had shared a student dormitory room - complete with the fragrance of sweaty socks from two other roommates, the hunger at the end of care packages from home, and beers bought with dormitory fee money. 🙂

He had completed an expensive online course and launched his own brand on Amazon. The merchandise was produced by a factory in China, which would package it nicely with his brand and ship it to an Amazon warehouse in America. From there, Amazon would handle absolutely everything until the product reached the American customer. They would also manage the post-sale relationship, tracking your interaction with the customer and the feedback you received. You essentially sat at the command panel in front of your laptop and managed the entire process. Your management determined the business's success, but compared to a classic business, without the associated logistical costs, it was the perfect business! From there, it depended on how involved you could or wanted to be.

Long story short, I jumped on board, signed up for the course in exchange for a beautiful sum of dollars, and took on all the possible fears from those around me who thought I had thrown money out the window. I was lucky to have an open-minded brother who immediately jumped on this train alongside me.

During the course, we identified the product to sell, according to well-established criteria such as profitability, growth potential, competition, and the number of reviews. A fairly important metric. Plus, from reviews, we could learn what wasn't working with the competitors' products and improve upon them.

Here's a picture of our first product:

Ankle straps for cable machines.
A product so niche that we imagined we would be among the few who would try it in the gym equipment market. The surprise was that three months after launch, we discovered the niche was already supersaturated with competitors from Romania, course colleagues who had done their homework identically to ours. 🙂
Fun fact: one of them was Lorand Soarez (a well-known financial and self-growth guru), whom I identified due to some skills I'll tell you about in another episode. 🙂

We decided we needed to differentiate ourselves and added a relatively cheap source product that had appeared on our radar but which we hadn't given much credit to, calculating that the profit would be too small and we'd need to sell in large volumes to make it worthwhile. Minimum order: 3,000 pieces. Silicone shoelaces, designed to replace classic shoelaces to facilitate putting on and taking off shoes. Practically, in my opinion, a miracle product - I had always dreamed of a cheap product that you could sell to millions and millions of people, again and again. Only at that moment, I didn't see its true potential.

We had ordered 1,000 ankle straps, so we were left with 2,000 shoelace pieces that would soon generate storage expenses.

Time buried our first product, which, despite being "quality", couldn't break through in the niche. This was compounded by the fact that, as we would later learn, the main competitors at the top of the list were using "black hat tricks", thus managing to keep us underwater.

We decided to list the shoelaces separately, draw a line, recover what we could, and lick our wounds.

Fortunately, the product took off like a "rocket", as we liked to say. It saved our business and put us on the next step. We never hoped it would go so well in such a short time.

This is where the "context" ends. 🙂

What did I actually want to tell you? 🙂

One of the indicators we were closely watching was the reviews section. In Amazon's early period, you could still directly address the customer (they later changed this section due to abuses). But it was forbidden to ask them to change their review in exchange for something. From here on, you had to skate on thin ice.

One morning - you know those mornings when you're with your laptop on the beach in Bali… 🙂

... No, one of those mornings when we would jump straight out of bed to open the mobile phone and track what happened overnight on the Amazon account (coffee came after, often bitter because "disturbance" moments on Amazon were daily), we woke up to a one-star review. The customer complained that a shoelace had broken and the purchased product was practically useless. Although our package contained many more shoelaces than needed for sneakers. Plus, they could use a shoelace one size up or down (the package came with increasing sizes). The customer was quite "vocal" and angry. The person had arthritis, and putting on and taking off shoes was a real problem for him.

We kept receiving such feedback from people with various conditions, whose lives we had changed. Yes, a somewhat banal product, a silicone shoelace, could change someone's life. We realized then that these were the customers who truly appreciated our product and could be our brand's best ambassadors. We communicated with them, to them, and considered each of their wishes or suggestions.

We reached this point of communicating our product:

because we had customers with one leg and prosthetics, who loved their existing footwear and could now use it without much hassle.

From the moment we received a one-star review, it was directly visible in sales. The overall review average would drop, and to raise it back, you needed several good reviews (I no longer remember the exact number, it was a mathematical calculation). And since positive reviews are hard to obtain, requiring time and sometimes a lot of money (if you decide to play dirty, as everyone did), we decided to focus on customers' problems, solve them, and hope they would change their feedback. Most of the time, we successfully resolved issues, and we would write and write, but they rarely responded. They understood what their negative opinion meant to us and would eventually update it.

We never stopped doing this.

We managed to identify the customer and, before anything else, gave a Refund (returned the money through the Amazon app) and sent a new product. We waited for package delivery confirmation (usually the next day for Amazon Prime accounts) and in the meantime found a way to communicate with them (which is why it's very important to maintain a detailed customer database - I'll tell you another time how extremely useful it can be). When the moment came, we wrote to them.

We ate humble pie (never blame the customer, even if you know the problem is on their end), wrote a plausible explanation (although we knew the shoelace had broken during installation because they hadn't used it correctly), put ourselves in his shoes :), and told him we knew exactly how they felt because we are customers ourselves for other products and understand the disappointment one can have in such cases. At the same time, we shared that we had a grandfather with the same problem (arthritis - this was true) and that such an invention would have been a great help to him.

We also told him we had refunded the money for the product he had purchased and additionally sent a new product for him to use with pleasure because we sincerely wanted him to experience the ease of putting on shoes and solve the problem. Moreover, we suggested he could gift the existing product to someone dear. We explained he could use the other shoelaces in the package without problems because, being elastic, they could still serve their function if shifted up or down a size.

And he responded!

Want to know what? 🙂

Of course, you want to know. I'm sorry I can't find where I saved the message because I usually saved all of them. But it's certainly somewhere, and I'll find it when I search through the big archive.

He was amazed that we went out of our way to solve his problem. He didn't expect to receive his money back and a new product, too. And most impressively, he hadn't thought about making a gift to someone he knew. He had elderly friends who would have appreciated the elastic shoelaces.

We didn't get around to asking him to change his review, obviously, if he felt that his issue had been resolved and that our Customer Care department (that is, me :)) had done a good job. We had an entire collection of craftily written responses, which we would compile and use, adapting them according to inspiration. It wasn't something standard; we preferred to adapt our language and tone to each client.

But we didn't get to write that because in the meantime, he updated his review to 5 stars and wrote to us. What I liked most, besides him thanking us wholeheartedly and praising how we reacted, was that he declared he would be the best ambassador for our brand from that point forward. And so it was, as he recommended us to friends and returned with a serious order of shoelace packages he intended to gift to acquaintances.

And that's how we realized these are or can be the best ambassadors of your brand. Dissatisfied customers whom you ultimately solve the problem for. How you do it depends on you. It's like dancing on a thin wire at a high altitude. But even if you cross to the other side, you'll completely change your perspective on your business and understand that it's not about goods or services, but about people and the problems you solve for them. For your "customers".

We would start each message like this:
"Hello, X! Thank you for being part of the Diagonal One family! We love to take care of each member of our family, …."

We can develop this topic even further if you leave me a message to see if there's interest. 🙂

In the meantime, I'm curious to know how you handle such a review. What Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) have you developed for this? And have you thought that the best brand ambassadors might be the very dissatisfied customers?

Good luck in all your endeavors!
Cătălin
(aka Gregory from the Customer Care department) 🙂