Alison Miles-Jenkins

Complaints handling using social media: the basics

Social media use is changing the game of customer complaints resolution and complaint handling.  At Reduce Complaints helping businesses improve their complaints handling is what we are about.  So to help those who are thinking about how this might be used to good effect in their business this article considers some of the basic steps you need to be thinking about to ensure your complaints resolution remains on track.

In this article on complaints handling and social media I focus on engaging with social media to help with complaints handling.

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One of the great benefits of social media is that is provides some free market research on your brand, products and service performance. The conversations on social media can give you access to positive and negative stories about your organisation. This means we need to be listening and seeking opportunities that are present in the conversations stored in social networks.

The old story that an unhappy customer will tell 20 or so friends has a changed. In the dynamic world of social media someone commenting negatively about an organisation can be magnified many times. Potentially thousands can hear about it.

These conversations may be on Twitter, YouTube, and other communities such as mumsnet.com. So you need to understand where your customers might be discussing you and perhaps needing your help. You want to be the first to hear about any dissatisfaction. You might also want to consider whether social media is likely to be used when other efforts to contact you have failed. If a complaint is received and dealt with effectively why would a customer want to Tweet negative comments? Surely that is more likely if you have not put something right quickly.

So don’t simply look for ways to engage with customers on social media and ignore the potential lesson from understanding that this channel is often used when frustration builds.

What to do when a complaint is spotted

Assume that you have a system to monitor the social media to find out about negative comments and complaints. The next step is to act when you get some results. Social media is an immediate channel. Speed is vitally important in complaints handling whatever communication channel you are using. This is true for social media. Social media doesn’t sleep either so it is potentially a 24 x 7 x 365 channel.

The key is to make sure you react quickly. When something goes viral it tends to do so quickly. If you are failing to acknowledge and deal with a problem you are running the risk of this happening. It is important to acknowledge the problem early. Reassure the customer that you have understood their concerns and that you are acting on them. That way the customer will be more likely to give you some time to investigate and respond.

Social media sites are different so you may need to use different approaches. The key is not to respond privately to the customer but to make sure your response is public so that it can be read by others. In other words anyone looking in can see you are doing something to try and resolve matters.

Some customer service teams when they open in the morning post an update to let customers know that they are ready for business. They sign off at night in a similar way to help structure customer expectations of when help is at hand.

You are going to struggle running a complaints handling dialogue in 140 characters in Twitter! So having found a problem and acknowledged it you want to get them onto a different channel as fast as possible – that might mean a direct message to them giving your phone number or email address.

If you do switch channel you need to keep monitoring to make sure the matter hasn’t resurfaced again in the social media world. If you are having success then they may be posting news about how well you have responded!

Alison Miles-Jenkins
Founder & CEO
Reduce Complaints

Article Tags: Complaints Handling, Social Media, Make Sure

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