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Providing a great customer experience even when things go wrong
A common concern about social media is that disgruntled customers can use a blog post or tweet to amplify their negative feelings about a company or organization beyond a normal level. It’s a reasonable concern, given that complaints (and accolades!) are a natural part of the interaction between a company and its customers, but when a complaint hits a tipping point and gathers lots of momentum in social media it can affect public perception of the company.
In a recent blog post, Justin Flitter, the social media manager at Zendesk has some ideas about what to do when your company receives public criticism. In addition to addressing and fixing the problem as fast as possible, Justin suggests:
- Make contact and call/talk to the person, asking questions that dig deeper into what happened
- Print out the blog post and read it during a staff meeting, even a board or management meeting
- Ask the customer to visit the store to talk to their staff about the experience they had
- Reply with a personal comment on the blog post from a senior person and the store manager to demonstrate awareness and appreciation
- Ask the blogger to return to the same store a month later to re-evaluate the customer service and test for improvements
It’s natural to be afraid of something bad happening when your customers complain publicly. But the other way to look at the situation, as an opportunity, might just make your company stand out from the pack.
How so?
Well, since the average customer experience is pretty lousy, responding and paying close attention to the person might be just what they needed…the worst thing you can do is ignore their concerns (even if they are overblown). Sometimes simply having someone actually listen to what is wrong and make it better is all that person wants…yes their experience was lousy but a good experience can quickly make up for it when that response is genuine.
At Performable we’re actually using our own software platform to monitor the experience of our customers in order to be able to react as quickly as possible when an issue does arise. We’ve found that Justin’s advice is right on…speed and authenticity in reacting is the key to turning these situations around.
