Why Negative Social Media Feedback Isn’t Always Bad For Your Brand

Turning a negative into a positive is one of the things that separate good businesses from great businesses, and there is no more public place to do it than on social media.

As the rise in popularity of social media continues and your business utilises and adds more social media followers, you become increasingly open to people seeing any criticism you receive. However, you also increase the amount of people who see you handle such problems with a great degree of effectiveness and so it’s a place to impress with your customer service skills.

Complaints are part of business

Any company worth its salt is going to receive complaints about its product or services now and again. Human error, faulty products and unruly customers can be the cause of all sorts of complaints, and you can cement your reputation for great customer service by how you deal with this negative side of social media. However, according to a post on Econsultancy by Vikki Chowney, just 11% of retailers respond to negative comments on Facebook.

Through answering complaints in a timely, intelligent, understanding and competent fashion you can create a wonderful and understanding image of your brand. This turns the negative into a positive and allows social media to become a tool for great customer service. If you can add the name of the individual who handled the complaint, this creates a personal feel and the customer doesn’t feel like they are talking to a huge corporation.

Canadian telecommunication company Telus trains their high level executives in social media. The company make the elite get their hands dirty with lower paid employees in the hope of improving customer service and ensuring decisions at the top end are correct and reflect foundation worries.

It’s how you handle them

Effectively handling complaints by having a designated person to deal with them on a regular basis can make you look competent, capable and on top of your customer service issues. It also encourages customers to engage with you, give feedback and can be a great marketing research tool.

A YouGov study of over 2,000 British consumers revealed that over 50% of people who complain on Twitter do so as they want companies to learn from their mistakes – making it a potentially invaluable tool for research.

Social media feedback, whether positive or negative can also be a great way to create a relationship and make your brand seem a lot more human. By turning your company from one perceived as a faceless corporation into one that is simply made up of sometimes fallible humans, you help create a positive image.

For example, when the Four Seasons in Palo Alto received a complaint on Twitter from a well-known customer who was unhappy that he had been dropped down a level of room. They responded instantly with a retweet offering him and apology and future benefits. In turn, he tweeted a positive reply promising to stay there and thanking them for being so helpful.

Of course, sometimes it’s just going to be a cantankerous customer causing problems and you’re going to have real issues. Listening carefully to all complaints allows you to spot a potential snag before it becomes a gaping hole, and social media can be at the centre of this. Quick, well calculated responses are everything, and 81% of Twitter users expect a same day response from companies – anything longer than this can be damaging.

Encourage customers to engage online and offline about issues they’ve had. Try and get them to call into you or for you to call them. This can give you an insight into problems your business is facing and allow you to nail them down before they get larger. By listening closely and taking quickly taking action you manage to prevent people turning a mole hill into a mountain.

Of course, the converse of this may have a very negative effect. Gartner predicts, ’The dissatisfaction stemming from failure to respond via social channels can lead to up to a 15 percent increase in churn rate for existing customers.’

How Business are Dealing with it

There are some great examples of companies that successfully use social media to create a positive image. For instance one rail company sends instantly upgraded time tables to those who complain about trains running late via social media, as well as an apology. Though, the train is not on time at least the complaint is acknowledged and information is provided.

Some companies are even going as far as combining social media in their call centres to manage complaints. The fact complaints are part of a public cog rather than a private one means that companies have to be on the ball in dealing with them and dedicated teams are often the best way to achieve this, as the automated message is far from enough. People expect fast and constructive resolutions and this is costing companies money. However, in this public sphere it seems the customer is always right – even more ‘always’ than ever before!

David Ingram

David Ingram is a social networking addict and enjoys nothing more than looking past the likes and retweets to try and figure out what really makes social relationships work. By day he works for MySocialAgency in London, and by night he reaches out to his friends from around the world using his beloved networks.

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