4 Critical Steps for Handling Customer Complaints on Social Media

For many customers, social media is the perfect place to voice complaints. On social media you don’t have to pick up the phone, you don’t need to be confrontational in person, and the internet offers a certain level of anonymity creating the perfect environment for complaints to be posted. Understandably, this can cause a headache for anyone managing social media pages.

How you respond to customer complaints on social media can make or break your reputation. When done right, it’s the perfect place to show your customers how much you care about them. Initially negative comments can quickly transform into positive customer interactions when you follow these 4 tactics.

Listen

Always listen to your customer’s feedback. These customers are taking the time out of their day to tell you about their experience. Good or bad — if it’s important enough for them to tell you about it, you should show them that their experience is important to you by listening.

This customer wasn’t even asking for a response or resolution in their complaint on Twitter, but Seamless showed they were listening, apologized for the mix-up, and offered to look into the situation more.

Respond with Compassion

You should never let a customer think their complaint has gone unheard. If you were dealing with the complaint in person or on the phone, you wouldn’t walk away or hang up without offering some kind of resolution, and social media shouldn’t be any different.

For the most part, you should avoid posting generic responses to customer complaints. Writing a personalized response is another great way to illustrate that you’re invested in each and every customer’s experience.

This Tweet from Bank of America is an example of a generic, automated response. The initial comment was politically motivated and had nothing to do with an account that needed to be reviewed.

It’s also important to be as quick as possible when responding. You definitely don’t want to let…