Wiping Your Nose Won’t Cure Your Cold
By
Gary Edwards
Less-than-glowing social media reviews are an unavoidable part of doing business in today’s consumer marketplace. No matter how hard the brand works to please its customers, it’s inevitable that a certain percentage of consumers will post negative brand mentions on Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media sites.
Clearly, some brands experience higher volumes of negative social mentions than others and are favorite targets for disgruntled consumers. Oftentimes, when these mentions occur, brands react to them with superficial comments or responses designed to save face and minimize the impact of the consumer’s displeasure on the company’s broader customer base—which may only seek to fan the flames.
But are knee-jerk responses really the best way to respond to negative social mentions? Aren’t cursory comments and other surface-level strategies essentially the same as wiping your nose to cure a cold?
The Problem with Shallow Social Responses
There’s no question that brands need to respond to all types of negative customer feedback, whether posted on a social media site or captured by some other means. But consumers are smart enough to know that shallow social responses are usually token actions that have no real impact on the root cause of the problem.
For example, every year in the U.S., millions of pieces of consumer feedback are provided to big box. Yet recent Empathica research shows only 46 percent of consumers believe that the feedback they provided was used to make substantive improvements to the customer experience, underscoring the skepticism consumers have about brands’ willingness to respond to their complaints.
To adequately respond to negative social media comments, brands need to dive deeper and leverage granular customer feedback insights to create better customer experiences at the local level.
Responding to Negative Social Media Feedback
In the past, we didn’t have the ability to collect the type of open range consumer feedback that social media offers. Rather than either ignoring social feedback or reacting to it in a cursory manner, brands should ramp up their ability to listen to social feedback (good and bad) and leverage it to make customer experience improvements.
- Remember it’s about locations. Customer experience improvements often take place at the local level, as that is where face-to-face interaction with staff occurs. It’s important to make sure that local managers have access to social feedback insights. Armed with the right tools, local managers can then translate these insights into meaningful changes for customers.
- Share, collaborate and improve. Collaborative tools, like “living libraries” of brand best practices, further empower local managers to respond to social feedback insights. Although negative social mentions may affect the entire brand, not all site managers have the skills or experience to formulate adequate responses. Sharing technologies resolves this problem by equipping the entire organization with proven responses to the root causes of specific customer complaints.
- Follow-through with action plans. The key to effectively converting negative social media mentions to brand wins is timely follow-through. Leading companies are reducing response times by providing local managers with tools and action plans that enable them to rapidly execute experience improvements based on feedback insights. When deployed in combination with local social feedback monitoring technologies, these tools provide customers with a visible assurance that their social comments are being seriously addressed by the brand.
Catalysts for negative social media comments can range from a substandard shopping experience to a frustrating call center encounter. But across the board, reacting to these complaints with superficial responses is a losing proposition.By actively listening to all forms of customer feedback and leveraging key insights to generate improved customer experiences, brands can reduce the volume of negative social mentions and recruit new generations of social brand advocates.
Dr. Gary Edwards, Chief Customer Officer at Empathica, is responsible for oversight of sales, marketing, client strategy, marketing science and retail insights. Gary is involved in solving business challenges with research and technology solutions. He has served a key leadership role during program development, implementation, and follow-up with clients for the past eight years at Empathica. For over 15 years prior, Gary led worldwide and domestic research projects in customer and employee research.
