We talk about social media often when it comes to new age marketing, how social media is all about creating and maintaining that sense of a personalized relationship with your customers. With 140 characters your customers can send a tweet praising your services they may have received at your business, broadcasting it to their entire network. Social media makes word of mouth have a greater reach. What happens when that tweet or Facebook status isn’t a positive message? How do you handle that?
Customer expectations via social media are a lot greater than phone support or email. When they call in they almost expect to be put on hold or have to wait a couple of days to receive any type of resolution. However, the average expectation for a response for customer support via social media is 30 minutes to an hour! Regardless of business hours, weekends, or holidays the average consumer expects a response within that time frame.
While most businesses aren’t equipped to deal with this type of response time, it does bring up the question most business owners are asking, “Do we really need social media?” More often than not, consumers will post negative comments instead of good ones. By staying off social media because you don’t think your business needs it, you could be missing vital information that could help you alleviate a problem or find better ways to reach your customers.
Next issue to tackle, how to actually handle these complaints.
- Document it- some things can be deleted or modified by the person posting it so it is important to have documentation in case the issue escalates
- Do not delete negative comments- it may be tempting to remove it from your page, but this is the quickest way to aggravate the one who is commenting. It also will bring your integrity into question for all of your followers.
- Play it cool- don’t take negative comments personally or engage. If the comment is clearly an attack or an effort to pick a fight, it’s best just to let it go.
- Check with your team- you can’t always predict what will happen on social media, so before reacting, communicate the issue to your colleagues and leadership.
- Don’t dilly dally- a slow response could hurt your reputation, word travels fast on social networks so be sure to alleviate the problem swiftly.
- Tone- your tone will set the rules of engagement for your site. Avoid sounding like an authority figure..
More than likely your customers are using social media to vent their opinions or to get you to address the issue. By publicly acknowledging their complaints and taking care of them in a calm and quick manner, you can alleviate the problem and at the same time help create a more loyal customer!