Social customer service: how to manage your reputation in a crisis

So what happens when a disgruntled customer decides to take to social media and berate your brand in full view of the world? People get upset when an organisation fails them in a way that matters. A few years ago, MIT Sloan Management Review offered a fascinating analysis as to why normally balanced people lose it and start to rant uncontrollably online. They discovered that when organisations significantly fail to honour their side of an agreement made with a customer over a service failure, things get bad. But things go ballistic when it occurs more than twice. At that point there is volcanic eruption from the sense of betrayal. And it takes a long time before that person can be reasoned with again.

Look out for `high influence’ customers
This is the extreme of how we can react. Of course, there are lesser injustices that can still make us feel the need to attack a brand. To this end, it is important to keep a constant lookout for your ‘high influence’ customers, celebrities and super-users.

These are usually those with high numbers of active followers. But be warned, this will not safeguard you. You cannot give ‘bendover- backwards’ problem resolution to only this profile of customer. Dave Carroll’s famous ‘United Breaks Guitars’ YouTube song is an example of how a previously anonymous customer can cause serious reputational and financial damage.

We also should remember that those in the digital world often rally to each other’s aid. Here is a story from Minnesota in 2010 that is extreme in every respect but is a dramatic illustration of the principle. A woman went to the movies and afterwards wrote a letter to the company complaining about the experience she and her husband and another couple had. She complained that the cinema offered no option to purchase tickets with a credit or debit card. This meant she and her husband had to use their cash for the tickets and then borrow money from the other couple to purchase refreshments. The lobby ATM was reportedly out of cash. Then, she said, the staff interrupted the movie to check the ticket stubs of the seated audience.

Wanting to inflict a little pain for her ruined experience she concluded: 'I did not pay $18.00 to have a distracted experience. I would rather drive to White Bear Lake, where they obviously know how to run a theatre, than have this experience again.'

Her barb obviously sunk in and the cinema’s vice president made the fatal mistake of doing a ‘Fawlty Towers’.

Sarah,
Drive to White Bear Lake and also go **** yourself. If you don’t have money for entertainment, get a better job, and don’t pay for everything on your credit or check card. You can also shove your time and gas up your ****ing *ss. Also, find better things to do with your time.
This email is an absolute joke. We don’t care to have you as a customer. Let me know if you need directions to White Bear Lake. [Name removed]
Vice president

That unfortunate outburst led to the immediate creation of a Facebook group called Boycott St Croix Falls Cinema 8.
In the end, more than 4,300 people joined the Facebook group, roughly twice the population of St Croix Falls (which was 2,133 at the 2010 census). Picketing was planned, and heated online discussions took place over several months. The cinema tried to back-pedal but it was too little too late. The volcano kept burning.

When does a drama become a crisis?
Sometimes issues can bubble away and then fizzle out without you having to do anything. But they can explode. Sometimes this is through your own doing, even though the consequences are not clear at the time. Did Tesco anticipate, prior to the horsemeat scandal, that a prescheduled post reading ‘we’re off to hit the hay’ would cause such a furore? Suddenly, the post was in very bad taste and brought out another lesson for social media crisis management: turn off all your prescheduled posts and tweets.

Sometimes things go wrong for uncontrollable reasons, such as when BT had to use Twitter to scale its communications and meet customer demand during the 2011 London riots as the emergency 999 service became overwhelmed with calls.

Let’s look at the best practices you might want to adopt as part of your own preplanned approach. The following ideas have been distilled from a wide variety of online sources offering their insights, often as a result of lessons learned.

’The first list focuses on the key stages with a typical crisis. The second is more concerned with communication etiquette on Facebook and communities during a crisis.

Crisis best practice

1. Use the skills of ‘active listening'. Listen hard. Seek to understand the other person’s reality. Don’t become personally involved. Ensure communication has succeeded. In fact, consider training up key players in the crisis management team. This will help you meet your goal of effective communication which lies at the heart of effective crisis response.
2. Listen before responding. Make sure you really understand the issue and what is driving their emotional response. But be quick.
3. Acknowledge the situation. For an individual customer crisis, this may need a reply post on the relevant social channel. For a crisis that affects many customers, consider a full acknowledgement on your website linked via social channels.
4. Use the power of saying sorry to help heal relationships. Remember you are not admitting liability by apologising for the experience. The exact root cause can be determined later. Never imply it might be the customer’s fault (even if it could be).
5. Apologise quickly and sincerely as soon as you have confirmation you made an error. If you messed up, admit that too. It’s best to be proactive with the truth, and take care to communicate it exactly as you want it received. Trust is lost when others have to fight you for the real situation. The affected individual will think better of you for it and the crowds will not feel the need to rally.
6. Let your customers know what steps you are taking, even if you have no definite resolution as yet. They need evidence that you are at least trying for them.
7. Be sensitive to the timing of communication. There is a natural sense when an update is needed. Either you provide it or someone else will create their own version of what is happening.
8. Don’t assume it is over until it really is. Fires can smoulder. Keep tracking via your monitoring platform for further rumblings in communities and forums beyond the obvious large channels and remain ready to respond. This might mean having trusted and empowered employees ready to proactively respond at any time.
9. Ensure the person responding is trained in necessary guidelines to create and post responses with minimal levels of sign-off. While you can pre-empt some guidelines, there also needs to be some autonomy to create customised and individual responses that acknowledge (directly with Twitter or Facebook tags) what the person is saying. Without this the comments from your brand will sound robotic and depersonalised. Too many layers of approval will only slow things down.
10. Be careful about ‘liking’ or replying to supportive comments directed towards your brand in a crisis. Selectively ‘liking’ and rewarding the positive sentiment is potentially going to fuel more negative sentiment. Instead, just ‘like’ and thank the generic posts that don’t refer to the crisis detail as you would usually.
11. Remain consistent with your brand voice and don’t regress into legalese, even if you are being advised by a legal team. Translate it into straightforward language and keep the tone honest, open and blame-free. The communication goal is to come across authentically so those involved stay engaged with you.
12. Ensure your legal advice is sound. Make sure as part of your contingency planning that legal expertise is available for certain scenarios.
13. When it’s over, learn from your crisis handling. Evaluate what worked well and what did not. Gather data from your monitoring platforms so that you can best focus your efforts in future situations and consider the impact on engagement.

Facebook and community best practice

1. Be clear about the posting policy of your online community or Facebook pages. Explain why a post might be deleted, edited or hidden (for example, on Facebook, the latter makes it still visible to the post author and their friends but not to your other fans). Never allow a user to be abusive to your staff or other community members. However, do not delete a post just because you don’t agree with it or because it is negative towards your brand. Let customers express their dissatisfaction. If you don’t, they will merely turn up the volume and/or go somewhere else to express it.
2. Use tools and permissions to pick up keywords that could indicate obscenity, abuse or hatred. Block profane language. Don’t block the word ‘hate’, though, as this could be used innocuously in everyday speech. Keep revisiting your keywords and adding or evolving them as needed. If your page or community has already been active at this point, just be aware that any tools or parameters that you set now won’t necessarily go back through posts that have already been submitted. Only new posts will be blocked or ‘pending approval’.
3. If you have a person who keeps attacking you in an abusive way on the forums or pages, consider banning or blocking them. It is about facilitating a civil and open discussion without allowing offensive posts. You could consider removing the offensive elements and reposting if you really want to make a point that you are allowing freedom of speech or expression, but in a polite and civil manner. Make sure your repost explains why you have had to edit and repost.
4. Keep your ego out of it. Remember the St Croix cinema example. Count to ten, take a step back. You cannot please everyone all of the time and it isn’t about you personally. It may be painful, but sometimes taking one on the chin is better than getting into a bar fight. Sometimes the more you publicly engage with someone, the more they will use it against you. Simply reply politely that you would be happy to continue the discussion offline and answer any specific questions they may have.
5. Thank people for their feedback and comments. They have taken time to engage with your brand (even if you don’t like it much) and, as such, the information is always useful at some level. Keep focused on the solution. At the end of the day, the solution is the best fix.

This is an edited extract from Delivering Effective Social Customer Service: How To Redefine the Way You Manage Customer Experience and Your Corporate Reputation, by Carolyn Blunt and Martin Hill-Wilson. Carolyn Blunt is managing director of Real Results Training Consultancy [email protected]. Martin Hill-Wilson is a customer service and social business strategist at Brainfood Consulting [email protected]

Taken from the March 2014 issue of Market Leader. Browse the archive here.