In the days before the explosion of social media and customer’s opinions being spread across the Internet, businesses had to focus their public relations efforts in different areas. Years ago, a bad company experience might result in the customer telling a few friends and those friends telling a few friends. At most an article or magazine might have heard about an article and published for a wider audience. However, these days businesses have a whole new realm of PR to tackle. Social media has become a way for people to spread a thought or experience to hundreds or even millions of people in the matter of minutes. A customer’s bad experience can be broadcast at an exponential rate. If businesses are not monitoring or do not respond correctly, sales, stock prices, and profits can decrease as word spreads around the world. Below are some things companies can do to track social media and reduce negative impressions.
- Company must be tracking social media to determine if there is an issue. This can be done by using a department dedicated to social media, tasking an existing department such as marketing or PR, or having employees track like was done by United.
- Admit to mistakes if the company is at fault. No one likes a company that will not admit to making a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes and our culture is very forgiving for those that are able to confess and learn from those mistakes.
- Make it right. If the company is at fault, they should by all means make the wrong a right and convey that action to the followers that are reading the social media. Even if the company is not completely at fault, it should portray to readers that it has made attempts at compensating the victim in some way. This proves to readers that the company cares about customer satisfaction even if the incident is not 100% company fault.
- Company must be tracking social media to determine if there is an issue. This can be done by using a department dedicated to social media, tasking an existing department such as marketing or PR, or having employees track like was done by United.
- Admit to mistakes if the company is at fault. No one likes a company that will not admit to making a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes and our culture is very forgiving for those that are able to confess and learn from those mistakes.
- Make it right. If the company is at fault, they should by all means make the wrong a right and convey that action to the followers that are reading the social media. Even if the company is not completely at fault, it should portray to readers that it has made attempts at compensating the victim in some way. This proves to readers that the company cares about customer satisfaction even if the incident is not 100% company fault.
- Prove that you’re doing something to fix it. A company should not just fix the issue at hand, but should prove to readers that the company is implementing practices to prevent the issue from happening in the future.
- Hire employees that believe in the company’s mission and have that mission aligned to best serve the customer. Happy employees and those that believe in the company and its mission, combined with a corporate culture that seeks to add benefit to customers will help align company actions to provide great customer service. In the event that an issue arises, the employees can hopefully help customers in a manner that will prevent the customer from being so angry that he/she wants to lash out through social media.
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