How Do I Handle a Complaint on Social Media?

So you’ve encountered a complainer, eh?  Studies show that more than 25% of these complaints go unanswered.  Usually most complainers just scurry off somewhere else to another provider, than bother with registering a complaint with owners and the businesses they are having trouble with. Countless millions (possibly even billions) of dollars is lost by those companies that may have had a say in rectifying the problem.

When you are given an earful by a complainer, there is really no one way to handle them, since every situation has it’s own individual character.  It’s certainly wise to consider each customer’s unique persona and react to each problem with on a one-on-one basis with both respect and courtesy.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube surely play critical roles in branding and keeping loyal customers.  At the same time it is these same social vehicles that can cause mayhem for a company or individual if even just one unhappy customer decides it their turn to voice their unhappiness with either your company, your product or you as a business owner or operator.  Social Interaction with your audience is expected nowadays, and knowing how to handle the “complainer” on your social media channels has it’s own certain method of finesse.

What Do You Do About It?

In this info-graphic, the folks over at Exact Target identified the five different types of complainers and how you can deal with them.  Read the entire article  ->> Exact Target

In Closing,

So as you can see, there may be some serious work involved, depending on the client your dealing with, however the strategies of handling social media complaints are really summed up in simple statement:

Give Your Client What They Want…and Do It With A Smile!

This kind of falls along the old adage of “the customer is always right” (though we know for a fact this isn’t always true!)  It’s more a matter of lending out of the conversation with the customer believing that they are right and that your were willing to accept that as a  fact!

In a future article, I’ll discuss some of the ways a business can rectify it’s potentially tarnished image on various social media avenues with what’s known in our industry as “reputation management”.

Until then,