It can be tough to respond to customer complaints. That's as true for the 16-year-old movie theater employee who has to explain that the popcorn machine is broken (I've been there) as it is for the social media manager who's fielding reports from customers thousands of miles away. In the moment you receive a complaint, the first instinct is to just get the issue resolved quickly. But keep in mind that you can do more than just response management. Take the opportunity to do response marketing, too.
Part of the reason why dealing with customer issues is stressful is that these moments signal a disconnect from ideal brand management. A brand is the sum of someone's interactions with a company. When we think of effective brand management, we think of delivering those interactions as systematically and consistently as possible-the ads you deploy for your product, the way your product looks and feels, the way people use it, and the messages you push on channels like your website, Facebook, and Twitter. The better you can systematize this complexity, the better you become at optimizing those interactions.
But frustrating or confusing a customer is never on-brand. When someone has a problem with your product, it means the system has broken down somewhere, and it can be challenging to put the train back on its rails.
Worse yet, if someone is airing their grievances on social media, those statements have the potential to color the brand for everyone who sees those posts. And there are a lot of posts. People complain 879 million times a year on social media about brands. In addition, more than two-thirds of online consumers have gone to a company's social media site to have an issue resolved or a question answered.
Moreover, you need to respond to as many of those as you can. Almost nine in 10 (88.3%) people said they would be less likely to buy from a company if their Facebook page has a lot of unanswered questions.
The Upside of Customer Complaints
Still, there are opportunities to capitalize upon when someone does complain. Some studies have found that addressing problems can lead to higher loyalty than if there was no problem at all. And when you have a high response rate on Twitter, customers are a bit more likely to rate you highly on customer service, Business Insider found:
However you choose to go about fielding these issues, keep in mind the difference between response management and response marketing.
Response management is what we normally think of when it comes to customer service; a client approaches you with an issue, you look into it, and you solve it for them. A simple, hopefully repeatable, transaction.
The best marketers, however, also realize that the response to a complaint is one of the interactions that add up to a company's brand. Don't miss the opportunity to make sure your responses over social are as on-brand as your standard messaging.
How Others are Doing Response Marketing
Response marketing should be personal and customized even as it reinforces your brand. This applies even if an issue is ultimately too complex to handle over social media, and you're limited to quick interactions that direct customers to another place where they can make more progress on their issue.
Below are a few ways companies are consistently going beyond mere response management. That doesn't necessarily mean such tweets will go viral or that they've been able to completely resolve issues over social-just that they're clearly conscious of their responses as branding opportunities.
JetBlue
In the airline business, you're likely to get a lot of complaints about delays-and customers won't be afraid to voice their displeasure online. Rather than ignore tweets on the subject, JetBlue repeatedly addresses these issues by commiserating over the pain of waiting on a flight and then emphasizing their concern for safety. This doesn't "solve" the issue, but it's a form of relationship management that ultimately strengthens their brand presence. See below for an example (and note the quick time to respond):
Jimmy John's
The sandwich shop has oriented its messaging around its quick delivery-so any problem with a delivery is a big hit to one of the brand's capabilities. The company takes the opportunity to shore up its stores' performance in this area when it isn't satisfactory (and does so with its signature casual, down-homey language). Results of this interaction aren't clear, but a hopeful sign is that the customer gave the reply a like.
Nike
Response marketing doesn't necessarily require that you resolve an issue completely over social; on the other hand, some brands like Nike have accounts dedicated to trying to do that. The example below shows a quick resolution to a simple request-but it puts key elements of the company's brand identity on display, like a reverence for hard work and a preference for short, authoritative sentences.
4 Must-Haves to Transform Complaints on Social into Marketing Opportunities
As with other areas of brand management, you'll need to deploy people, processes, and technology to do response marketing right. But first-what does doing it "right" mean? Three things:
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Doing it effectively: Your response should both reinforce your brand identity and help the customer make progress on resolving their issue
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Doing it fast: The faster you respond, the better. Forty-two percent of people who have complained on social media have said they expect a response within an hour, one study found.
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Doing it consistently: Responding effectively and quickly doesn't mean much if you can only do it once. You need the processes and tools to do the above in a scalable, repeatable way.
Below are some of the things Marketing needs to meet those criteria.
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Robust monitoring capabilities
To resolve issues you need to first find them, but differentiating complaints on social media from irrelevant noise can be tough when they're in the form of Facebook posts to a personal news feed, or tweets that don't @mention your brand. Take the time to invest in tools that help you create well-scoped searches on the channels where your audience lives.
2. A partnership with the customer service experts...
Social media customer service is a unique, interdisciplinary cross-section. Your responses should be informed by both the employees in the company who understand the best ways to solve problems and resolve issues and by marketers who understand the company's social media voice. Learn from the customer service reps about their most commonly received questions. In return you can educate them on what it means to be on-brand. Try establishing brand prompts-clear criteria you can establish and share that determine whether a social media message jives with your brand (for instance, based on the example in my last post, Jimmy John's might ask: is your post written in folksy language? Does it encourage friendliness and cooperation?)
3. ...That doesn't get in the way of quick response formulation
When you loop more people into a process, you nearly always run the risk of greater inefficiency slowing you down-and remember, when it comes to response marketing, if you don't do it fast then you've fallen below the expectations of almost half the people who bring up a problem over social.
Establish processes and use platforms to decentralize decision-making as safely as possible to minimize such inefficiencies. You can get ahead of potentially infuriating approval wait times with tools that facilitate collaboration when it's needed and with systems that expedite rules-based decisions.
One necessary step is for marketers to sit down and discuss pre-approved messages for common issues with customer service representatives (as well as other parties like Legal who might be interested in the approvals process). Think back to the JetBlue example in my last post; messages often relate back to how awful delays can be and how safety is a priority. These are simple responses that don't need to go through multiple reviews.
Of course, some occasions call for a more bespoke response. Social media managers should have clear guidelines for what makes a message on-brand-the brand prompts I mentioned in the previous section of this post-so they can formulate their own replies within the parameters of the brand.
And in instances where the complaint is rare or sensitive and a response really should go through reviews, employees need to be able to flag the post to others in the organization to collaborate efficiently.
Hopefully your social relationship platform has the power to let you use and tweak pre-approved messages, enforce adherence to brand prompts before a post is published, and expedite the flagging and collaboration process.
4. The ability to learn from your customers (and act on that knowledge)
Remember New Coke? It's an extreme example of how powerful customer complaints can be in determining the strategic course of a company. It took less than three months of objections from disgruntled, loyal "classic" Coca-Cola consumers for the company to abandon New Coke as its flagship product.
For more modern examples of using customer feedback to improve a brand's offerings, look to General Motors, Dick's Sporting Goods, and Five Guys. They're using what customers say on social to find and shore up weaknesses. At GM, for instance, the social media team was able to relay customer sentiment about a faulty cooling-ventilation system to engineers who made adjustments.
Effective brand management is increasingly a function of your ability to gather information, learn from it, and use what you've learned to constantly improve. This closed-loop model applies to what you can learn from customer service issues-indeed, if customer complaints signal that the "system" of brand management has broken down, you need as much information about those problems as possible to improve that system. Think of it as free-floating market intelligence, waiting to be collected, analyzed, and acted upon.
In the shorter term, that could mean using tools to tag complaints and monitor trends over time. What can you learn about what is causing issues? Are they related to a specific product line, service in a local region or at different times of day, availability, defects, or unrealistic expectations on the part of customers? You can use this information to adjust your marketing strategy or help other parts of the company fix product defects, improve employee training, modify the supply chain, or rework anything else that might be contributing to customer complaints.
In the longer term, this information can help your company better understand customer preferences and behavior-and thus inflect corporate strategy in the form of new products, positioning or pricing. In other words, you're tapping into customer information that can elevate the standing of the marketing function throughout the company; the more you can use and help others use it, the stronger your brand and team performance will be.