Tweet complaints a reality, a new challenge for complaints handlers

Business Articles | August 26, 2011

With customers turning to Twitter and Facebook to gather support for their complaints organisations need to acquire new skills to deal with this. In this article Alison Miles-Jenkins gives some news on the latest developments in this field.

In recent articles we’ve been raising the profile of social media complaints handling. There is growing evidence that customers are increasingly turning to Twitter and Facebook to vent their frustrations at having their complaints ignored. Online campaigning is becoming a power tool forcing businesses to fix unresolved issues.

News from Australia recently featured the consumer group Choice which said its members were using social media to air their complaints. Choice was encouraging businesses to monitor what people were saying about them and as a result, rectify complaints more quickly.

Ingrid Just, a spokeswoman for Choice, said consumers were finding that Twitter and Facebook were successful in getting results after receiving the cold shoulder from customer service departments or generic email responses.

"Many businesses monitor what people are saying about them online and some are taking proactive steps to rectify problems by directly contacting those who are posting comments," Ms Just said.

Ms Just said companies were reviewing their service standards as a result of online activism.

''Vodafone revised its service and network model as a result of consumer complaints on vodafail.com" Ms Just said.

There are plenty of other examples, including a man who used Facebook to complain that replacement parts for were not delivered.

Within a day some twenty employees of the supplier had seen the complaint and the company's national director of sales emailed the customer directly to say he would sort out the problem.

So you can see that getting your complaints handlers comfortable with dealing with complaints from the world of Social Media is an essential part of good complaints handling.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alison Miles-Jenkins, described as “inspirational and aspirational”, is Managing Director of an award-winning training and management consultancy Training To Achieve which she set up in 1990. Since then, she has been at the forefront of helping individuals, teams and organisations become great at customer service. A staggering 36,000 employees, managers and business owners now perform more successfully as a result of being trained by Alison. She also heads up Reduce Complaints a specialist complaints handling training business.

Alison has developed a specialism in complaints handling and is in demand from those who need some help in handling those tricky customer interactions.