The Voice of Your Company
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 | by Peg
Your office manager is online and notices a comment on a customer’s Facebook page regarding their last interaction with your business, and it is less than complimentary. She responds in a very defensive manner, blaming the customer for the problem. All of a sudden something that could have been dealt with in a more customer-friendly way is out there for the world to see. And your customer is no longer “always right,” but publicly berated as incompetent. Sometimes a well-meaning employee can inadvertently fan fires or add to misinformation even with the best intentions.
Being able to listen, respond to and handle customer feedback in a positive manner can make or break your business. And in our world of instant online access to most anyone’s opinions, your employees wear the company’s collective public relations hat 24 hours a day.
Nothing can replace customer feedback; they know best how they like to be treated, what you are doing right and what you can do better. Worse than not listening to that feedback (or not asking, which is another topic for another day) is responding defensively or unprofessionally.
We all know that honest listening is critical to conveying your interest in your customers’ wellbeing and their business. The wealth of opportunities to hear this conversation with the advent of social media is a gift. But some comments are hard to take, and it is only human to want to invalidate negative feedback or respond emotionally. How you respond will make the difference between that customer being yours or your competition’s tomorrow.
In a perfect world you would train your employees how to handle criticism that may arise. Gathering information to deal with real problems, defusing customer anger and building rapport, communicating with confidence and assurance, maintaining professionalism, and creating solutions are all valuable skill sets. But this level of training for every employee is rarely feasible. The next best thing is to have a policy in place that explains how you expect your employees to deal with these situations, i.e. not directly responding, but passing along the information to someone within your firm who does have the training and can best deal with the challenge.
It is imperative that you convey your expectations to employees to ensure the very public nature of social media is handled to your best advantage.
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