CHAPTER 15

Quelling a Social
Media Firestorm

YOUR COOKIE COMPANY has always been ahead of the times, particularly when it comes to using social media with customers. You have a fan page on Facebook, a Twitter account, and a thriving online community where people post questions and answers about your products. If you were any more connected with your customers, you would probably have to move in with them.

One day, a customer posted a negative comment on your Facebook page, complaining that his last order from you arrived late. Worse, because his settings are set to only show your posts rather than to view everyone’s, he mistakenly thought you were deleting his comments. Outraged, he began mass-posting hateful comments about you online. Now what do you do?

The rule in customer service used to be that if someone was happy, he would tell four people, and if they were unhappy, he would tell eleven people. Today, thanks to the rise of social media, those numbers are way off. When musician Dave Carroll watched baggage handlers toss around and break his expensive guitar on a United Airlines flight, and then got nowhere trying to get the airline to compensate him, he composed a song, “United Breaks Guitars,” that has now had over twelve million views on YouTube. The airline finally offered to make things right after a firestorm of negative publicity, and today United actually uses this video in its customer service training.

When a customer gets mad at you and starts acting out on social media, you have two agendas. The first is to take care of the problem. The second is to let the public know you are taking care of the problem—and better yet, for the customer to help with this. In this chapter, we offer some guidelines for how you might handle this situation.

Be Real

In Chapter 4, we discussed avoiding trigger phrases that infuriate customers. In a world of social media, this includes most of the stilted, corporate prose that most companies use in their written or email communications, such as, “Sir, we are investigating your request,” or, “We regret to inform you . . .” When used online, phrases like these sound like they were uttered by a robot.

Instead, use genuine, accessible language—the kind you might use with a good friend over lunch. As part of a technology that started with young people, social media have brought with them a greater expectation of informality. So, as we have recommended throughout the book, lead by acknowledging the customer. In this case, you might start your message with something like, “This sounded like a pretty frustrating experience. We want to make this situation right.”

Be Quick

What you say is very important, but how soon you say it is almost as important. Customer complaints can go viral quickly through social media. Moreover, people look at your response time as a measure of how much you care about your customers. This means that comments in cyberspace can’t wait for your next weekly committee meeting. It is important to provide a same-day reply, even if it is just to tell someone you are looking into the problem.

Make your reply to customer criticism all about the customer. Social media are magnifying glasses for how responsive you are to customers. Even if you are technically correct, focusing on defending or explaining yourself can be like throwing fresh bait into shark-infested waters: It can cause a feeding frenzy of negative responses. Instead, validate legitimate criticisms and keep a laser focus on doing what is right for the customer.

For example, suppose this customer’s shipment was delayed because he chose a cheaper ground-shipping option with no guaranteed delivery date. In this case, you might say, “Even though we don’t have control over ground shipping once our cookies leave the factory, two weeks is a long time to wait. Especially for cookies!” Or suppose the problem was your fault because his order was lost. In this instance, you should lean in and completely own his complaint the way we discussed in Chapter 2: “We messed up, pure and simple. Your order got lost in our system. That was inexcusable.” Then, in either case, propose a fair solution to the issue, or, better yet, get in touch personally, as we describe in the next step.

Reach Out to the Person Behind the Keyboard

When you communicate with people in cyberspace, you still aren’t quite a real person to them. They haven’t connected you with a name and a face. Often, social media complaints are best used as an entree to contact someone in person and resolve the issue.

In this particular case, personal contact is essential. Since the customer is unaware that you are not responding due to a technical problem on his end, the only way to straighten things out is to get in touch. Your goal is not to point out his mistake, but rather to normalize it as something that could happen to anyone, as discussed in Chapter 10. Then you can negotiate whatever would be needed (and appropriate) to make him happy.

Trust the Will of the Crowd

Today, companies often fear that someone will post something negative about them using social media. But check out other companies’ social media sites and you will discover that the general mood of customers is reflected pretty accurately. In cases where a company truly has poor service in the public eye, complaints can often spark a feeding frenzy where other people chime in and express their displeasure. But if your company has a strong service reputation, something amazing often happens: People respond to complaints by jumping to your defense.

This means that although you should work hard to address concerns that people post online, there is no need to overreact to an individual negative post. In much the same way that people’s reputations are formed in the real world, your organization’s reputation within social media is truly an aggregate of everyone’s overall impressions.

The example in this chapter was paraphrased from a true story, and here is how it actually ended: When the customer realized that the company had not deleted any of his comments, he felt silly, took them down, and publicly announced that the company had taken care of the situation. Being proactive and focusing on the customer’s interests—even when complaints are unfair or misguided—will generally have a strong ripple effect on how people talk publicly about your organization online.