Responding to complaints on social media

16 December 2015 6376 Views

The huge increase of social media as a business tool has changed the way in which we communicate with our customers. However this comes at a price; now customers have the platform to voice their complaints to the world, meaning we have to handle these complaints.

Our agency Pinnacle lettings has over 7,000 followers on social media and we have received our share of negative attention. Mistakes will be made by us, a contractor or a landlord; customers expect us to be perfect but they do expect us to fix their issues quickly.

So our social media approach is;

It’s a conversation

Don’t forget to respond and engage with any and all positive feedback that comes to your page.  Your page will naturally attract complaints to it, as people are more likely to want to share negative experiences and vent on your page. Whereas people who have had a positive experience of your service will be harder to find on social media, so when you receive a positive post to your page say thank you, and ask them what they thought was done particularly well by your company.

Listen

People complain because they want their concern to be listened to. Sometimes they just want to rant; we listen and let them know we are listening. In the same way we handle a face to face complaint in branch. We do not look to have an online argument, we just listen.

Move to private messaging

Ask if we can move to private messaging. Be careful to make sure it doesn’t sound like you are trying to hide the problem. The best way of doing this is to apologise, state that you want to do everything you can to rectify the issue and then ask if they can privately message you more details about the issue.

Set some rules

On your page have simple comments guide about what people can and cannot say on your page. This allows you to delete anything that you deem to be rude or offensive on your page, and keeps conversations civil. However be careful when it comes to deleting, social media users will notice when their posts are deleting and will just keep posting them, unless you give them a reason as to why.

To get more insights go the the LetMC app store, https://www.letmc.com/application-store/