Handling consumer complaints on social media?

Your customers can leave negative comments on social media and that can harm your brand reputation quickly. But responding correctly to consumer complaints in social media can infact help you increase customer loyalty and retention. We have successfully resolved many complaints by using social network. But if you think that your complaint was not resolved by Voxya then read this article instead, to know why it was not resolved.

Anyways, here are the tips to correctly handle consumer complaints in social media :

1. Quickly Acknowledge Mistakes
When a customer posts a consumer complaint on social media, don’t take time to reply his complaint. Infact you need to reply quickly without wasting any time. Also, you need to acknowledge mistakes because if you have made a mistake, it’s best to accept it. But remember to be very positive while acknowledging mistakes. So both the things are important – being on time and acknowledging the mistake.

2. Take Conversation Offline
When customers are angry its better to talk offline through a telephone or email. You can ask customers to provide their email or phone so that you can talk to them personally. Infact this will help you to take conversation offline. If you are not doing this then other customers can join in the complaint on social media.

3. Give Personalized Response
While handling consumer complaints, you should build rapport by personalizing your response in social media. Usually, this can be done by including customer’s name and complaint details in the reply. A personalized reply will convey that you have actually gone through the complaint and really wants to help.

4. Show Transparency
Explain what you are going to do and how it is going help in resolving the consumer complaint. The resolution process should be very clear to the customers. Also, do not forget to provide a genuine escalation plan to resolve the issue in the minimum time frame.

5. Go the Extra Mile
When customers are not happy, you need to go the extra mile to help solve their problem. You can soothe emotions by offering replacements or rewards. This will demonstrate that the relation with that customer is more important than an one-off monetary loss.

6. Don’t Remove Complaints
You should not delete consumer complaints that are posted by angry customers in your social media. Infact deleting them will prompt them to post more negative comments to vent their frustrations. However, you can delete negative comments if the customer is more frustrated than the issue demands.

So, these were the simple tips to handle consumer complaints and re-gain customer trust in your social network. What are you waiting for? Go and start improving 🙂

How companies should resolve consumer complaints

If you are a company or brand, you should admit that mistakes happen. You might be 99% perfect but still that 1% figure leaves enough space for lot of unhappy customers. So, resolving consumer complaints are important to succeed in business.

When you get a consumer complaint, you can either lose an angry customer or choose to hear him patiently, and get a brand advocate for life. Actually the companies should regard customer complaint as an opportunity. If an annoyed customer is successfully pacified then there are chances of building trust and long-term relationship with him.

It is not necessary that companies should invest a lot for resolving consumer complaints. Even very simple steps can make huge difference. Lets see how companies and brands can easily resolve consumer complaints:

1. When an upset customer tells his story, the companies needs to hear him with all ears. Anger can recede rapidly if someone listens to a customer’s grievance.

2. Empathize with the customer. Brands should understand the emotions of the customers, and let him know that his pain (grievance) is genuine.

3. Apologize sincerely. Customer does not always need compensation, instead they want an apology from someone who has authority in the company.

4. Act quickly to resolve the issue. The companies should allow their customer service teams to offer discounts, compensation and gifts etc to convert the unhappy customer into satisfied advocate.

5. Cure the problem. For becoming successful business, it is important to find out the real reason why that mistake occurred. Any faulty process should be removed or modified so that mistakes should not get repeated.

Finally, it may seem easier to let an angry customer go and focus on new customers. But successful businesses know the power of customer satisfaction to achieve better customer retention.