Social Media tracking has been promoted (I have recommended this) as a way to reach customers and possibly deal with disgruntled customers to offer improved customer service and keep the rabble happy.
When you can track Twitter 24/7 and see all the complaints, what should you do?
- Close your account?
- Fight back with facts?
- Fight back with offers to kiss and make up?
- Fight back with noise that just buries the comment?
- Call the complainers?
Wanna Kiss & Make-Up?
Close out? No, silly. That was never the intent even of the complainers. Many times you weren’t the absolutely most despicable product available, but were just at the wrong point of a ‘crabby day’. And the minute the spleen was vented, you were even a forgotten item.
Skip the fighting ideas — that only opens you up for argument, calls attention to your dark side and emphasizes something that may be connected to that ‘crabby day’ thing I mentioned earlier. A need/issue you can’t fix.
If you have a lot of complaints or you see one that is valid, experts in customer service recommend calling the complainer. Don’t wait till they get online tomorrow to see if someone saw their cute, snotty, smutty post about you. Keep it offline and get the issue resolved. You will benefit as will the customer who didn’t get the right deal — the deal you intended to deliver.
The viral thing I have noticed that unless you have a valid problem, a snotty, smutty tweet will stop there. I’ve seen one that was picked up and retweeted in a feed where I happened to find it in a non-typical search on Twitter. That particular day I was able to track that tweet right to the source. But, guess what; feeds don’t often bring action to the 4th and 5th level…in 10 days, I couldn’t go back to either one of those tweets because of this message: ‘older updates are not available’
As written in the Twistimage.com blog, “When Not Responding Online Is The Right Response“, sometimes just not responding is the best response. Let your social media staff monitor activity around your business, weigh each issue for the validity and make a decision about how you will address it. OFFLINE may seem archaic, but it is valuable in controlling the viral online aspect when you can.
