Social Media Is A Powerful Communication Tool

Social media is a powerful tool for instant communication with your customers. While promoting your business through social media can help you spread positive word of mouth, it also gives unhappy customers a platform to voice their dissatisfaction. No matter what industry, or what product or service you supply, you will encounter negative customer feedback and complaints.

When you come across customers who have voiced their complaints on social media, follow these steps to handle the situation in a way that positively represents your company even when dealing with negative feedback.
 

How To Handle The Situation Positively

• Acknowledge And Analyze
  The first step is to recognize the complaint and determine the best way to respond and remedy the problem. When a concern is voiced by a known client or customer, it’s important to acknowledge their concern quickly, but be careful of critics or trolls who are simply looking to attack a business to reach your followers and increase their social media engagement.
• Respond Quickly, But Be Prepared
  When you receive a negative comment, your first instinct is probably to correct the situation as quickly as possible. It’s vital to show your customer, and your followers, that you have acknowledged it and are working to correct the situation by responding in a timely manner.

  However, don’t let the fear of not responding quickly enough stop you from understanding the situation first. Before you can address your customer’s concern, you have to understand the nature of the complaint and how you can rectify the situation.

• Choose Whether To Stay On Social Media Or Make It Private
  In many cases, a complaint or concern should be handled on social media. Your response online may help other customers and act as an example of your great customer service. When keeping the conversation online, you show your followers that you are working to keep your communication open and honest.

However, there are times when you should move the conversation to a private communication method like email or a phone call. Once you have moved the conversation off social media, you can work personally to correct the situation and increase goodwill with your customer.

How you handle interactions with critics and negative comments on social media is important to your business’s image online. Businesses should always take the high road and focus on resolving the issue and using it as an example of successful dialogue and customer service.

Featured image courtesy of https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SocialMedia_Marketing.jpg.