A report by VB Insight has revealed that mod­ern con­sumers com­plain about brands an aston­ish­ing 879 mil­lion times a year on Face­book, Twit­ter, and oth­er social media por­tals, with 10 per­cent of those con­sumers mak­ing a com­plaint on social media every day.

In a sur­vey of over 11,000 inter­net users across the Unit­ed States, VB Insight’s research also found that 17.4 per­cent of con­sumers com­plain to brands using social media on a week­ly basis, and some­what wor­ry­ing­ly, that 32.8 per­cent of brands nev­er offer a response to social media com­plaints, mean­ing up to 289 mil­lion com­plaints go unan­swered every year.

And one does­n’t need to look too far for an exam­ple of how at this very moment, con­sumers are using the chan­nel to voice their dis­sat­is­fac­tion for a brand. In the past week for exam­ple, dis­grun­tled cus­tomers who used Uber ser­vices on New Year’s Eve have been upload­ing receipts for their taxi ser­vices on the night. The aston­ish­ing fares, often num­ber­ing hun­dreds of dol­lars for a jour­ney of just a few miles, have shocked and appalled and the back­lash has done no favors for the com­pa­ny’s surge pric­ing sys­tem, which algo­rith­mi­cal­ly increas­es fares in instances of high demand.

@Uber You are despi­ca­ble. $116 for a 7 mile ride? Next year we’ll just dri­ve drunk, I guess. Thanks, Uber!

— Col­in Grif­fith (@colingriffith) Jan­u­ary 1, 2014

Just a cou­ple of weeks ear­li­er Uber were crit­i­cised for increas­ing fares by up to four times the nor­mal rate dur­ing a Syd­ney hostage cri­sis, pun­ish­ing those who attempt­ed to get away to safe­ty. While Uber lat­er apol­o­gized for the inci­dent, the com­bined neg­a­tive sen­ti­ment towards Uber’s pric­ing strat­e­gy on social media in the past few weeks, shows how neg­a­tive social media com­plaints can begin trend­ing, and have the pow­er to neg­a­tive­ly impact the per­cep­tion of a brand.

As expect­ed, in many cas­es it is the 18–34 year olds, or so called GenX’ers, that are lead­ing the charge in terms of using social media to com­plain to brands, how­ev­er the report iden­ti­fied “Dig­i­tal Grey Fox­es” – 55- to 64-year-olds increas­ing­ly at home with tech­nol­o­gy – also mak­ing the most of social media chan­nels to address brand griev­ances, with indi­vid­u­als in this age-group hav­ing dou­ble the com­plaint rate of younger con­sumers.

5 Reasons Social Media Complaints Must Be Taken Seriously

There are a num­ber of good rea­sons why con­sumers are turn­ing to the chan­nel to voice their com­plaints, and why the brands who aren’t prop­er­ly address­ing their cus­tomer’s griev­ances ought to recon­sid­er how they are con­duct­ing their oper­a­tions on the social media plat­forms they are active on:

1. Social media is the most con­ve­nient way for cus­tomers to com­plain: Social media pro­vides a much more appeal­ing medi­um for con­sumers to address their gripes for two rea­sons. One, it pro­vides a quick and stress free means for con­sumers to open a dis­course with a brand – much eas­i­er than nav­i­gat­ing a intri­cate switch­board that puts you on hold for long peri­ods and charges by the minute. And two, it allows them to share their expe­ri­ences with their friends and fol­low­ers, some­thing we seek to do nat­u­ral­ly when stressed or aggriev­ed.
2. Social media rep­re­sents empow­ered con­sumers: For the rea­sons out­lined in point num­ber one, social media pro­vides con­sumers with a sense of empow­er­ment. Com­plaints on social media can neg­a­tive­ly influ­ence the per­cep­tion of a brand and mar­ket. If you brand isn’t per­ceived to be lis­ten­ing and atten­tive to a cus­tomers needs, then you’re send­ing a mes­sage to con­sumers to look to one of your com­peti­tors the next time they are seek­ing out a ser­vice or prod­uct.
3. Con­sumers have high expec­ta­tions for your brands: Brands that are doing well in address­ing con­sumer com­plaints on social media, those address­ing cus­tomer com­plaints quick­ly and effi­cient­ly, are rais­ing the bar in terms of com­mon expec­ta­tions. It means that con­sumers are com­ing to expect a first class ser­vice from all the brands they have a rela­tion­ship with. To illus­trate this, research has shown that as many as 53 per­cent of con­sumers now expect brands to respond with­in one hour, and 70 per­cent are not expect­ing to be ignored.
4. Unhap­py users share neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences: As report­ed in July 2013 by Lithi­um Tech­nolo­gies, cus­tomers who don’t receive a sat­is­fac­to­ry response look to their social media chan­nels to share their neg­a­tive expe­ri­ences to ‘vent’. Lithi­um’s research sug­gest­ed that 29 per­cent of con­sumers who did­n’t receive a sat­is­fac­to­ry response from a brand would tell friends and fam­i­ly about their expe­ri­ence, and a fur­ther 26 per­cent would “esca­late their con­cerns through oth­er sources of com­mu­ni­ca­tion”.
5. Social media com­plaints are an oppor­tu­ni­ty for your brand: This one’s the kick­er. Social media com­plaints aren’t all doom and gloom, when han­dled cor­rect­ly they offer a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for brands to turn some­thing neg­a­tive, into some­thing that can actu­al­ly serve to ben­e­fit a brand’s rep­u­ta­tion. Social media is part of a brand’s over­all pub­lic pres­ence, a direct con­nec­tion to the con­sumers on which a brand depends, and in that sense it’s a great oppor­tu­ni­ty to share brand val­ues and show con­sumers what you’re made of!

How Can Brands Best Turn Complaints Into Something Complimentary?

VB Insight’s stats sug­gest that there is a short­fall in the num­ber of brands that are respond­ing to cus­tomer com­plaints ade­quate­ly, or at all, but there are some brands who are build­ing up their rep­u­ta­tions on social media for their adept­ness at lis­ten­ing to their con­sumers.

While there are chal­lenges to deal­ing with con­sumer com­plaints, an obvi­ous one being the 140 char­ac­ter lim­it on Twit­ter for exam­ple, with a lit­tle cre­ativ­i­ty and orga­ni­za­tion of a com­pa­ny’s social media sup­port, there’s a good chance brands can turn poten­tial­ly neg­a­tive com­plaints into some­thing pos­i­tive for the brand.

Here are some exam­ples of brands deal­ing with con­sumer com­plaints well, with insights that you can use in your own mar­ket­ing.

JetBlue

Jet­Blue are often acknowl­edged as one of the most adept com­pa­nies on Twit­ter at han­dling con­sumer com­plaints. A study by Hub­Spot showed the extent to which the com­pa­ny’s social media team were will­ing to the extra mile, affirm­ing their rep­u­ta­tion among con­sumers.

The com­pa­ny aver­ages an impres­sive 10 minute response time (espe­cial­ly impres­sive con­sid­er­ing the com­pa­ny receives 2,500–2,600 men­tions a day on Twit­ter alone).

While Jet­Blue’s response rate is admirable, the goals of the social media team are not mere­ly to respond. The air­line also pri­or­i­tize respond­ing to tweets where staff can con­tribute val­ue. Said Lau­rie Meacham, man­ag­er of cus­tomer com­mit­ment at jet­Blue:

“We rec­og­nize how impor­tant it is to mea­sure the ROI of our social media efforts, but we actu­al­ly make a point of not mea­sur­ing response rate on Twit­ter. We want our employ­ees to engage smart­ly, and for the con­ver­sa­tions to be organ­ic and nat­ur­al. We look for oppor­tu­ni­ties to add val­ue and con­nect with our cus­tomers, not just respond to every sin­gle men­tion that comes our way.”

Air­lines have a par­tic­u­lar oblig­a­tion to pro­vide excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice, in times of bad weath­er or delays for instance, keep­ing cus­tomers well informed and updat­ed can work won­ders in pla­cat­ing frus­tra­tions. Show­ing cus­tomers that you are lis­ten­ing and care about their well­be­ing can be the dif­fer­ence that wins the loy­al­ty of a cus­tomer.

Dell

In the past few years, Dell have intro­duced a com­pre­hen­sive a cus­tomer first social media com­plaints han­dling process in a move encour­aged come right from the top of the busi­ness. The com­pa­ny have an appoint­ed ‘Lis­ten­ing Czar’ respon­si­ble for the over­all inte­gra­tion of Del­l’s social media sup­port offer­ing.

The com­pa­ny now employ a team of 70+ social media cus­tomer ser­vice offi­cers oper­at­ing from a state of the art “Social Media Lis­ten­ing Com­mand Cen­ter”, man­ag­ing up to 25,000 social media inter­ac­tions per day.

KLM

Anoth­er air­line who have pri­or­i­tized first class com­plaints han­dling via social media, KLM’s dri­ve towards being a lead­ing brand on social media was neces­si­tat­ed by the dis­rup­tion to Euro­pean air trav­el as a result of the Eyjäfjäl­läjökull erup­tion in 2010. The com­pa­ny, who at the time was mere­ly ‘exper­i­ment­ing’ with social media, found their Twit­ter feed inun­dat­ed with con­fused, des­per­ate, and often angry cus­tomers seek­ing guid­ance or a response from the air­line.

In a bold but nec­es­sary move, the air­line gath­ered 100 non-oper­a­tional per­son­nel to respond to the back­log of cus­tomer com­plaints on social media, and thus their social media team was born. KLM’s social media team now con­sists of a ded­i­cat­ed team of 200+ employ­ees who mon­i­tor the air­lines social media chan­nels to pro­vide 24/7 sup­port. The aver­age response time is gen­er­al­ly under an hour for all cus­tomer com­plaints, and in fact, a tick­er of the cur­rent aver­age response time is updat­ed in the air­lines cov­er pho­to on Twit­ter every five min­utes.

Final Thoughts

The com­pa­nies includ­ed all have a ded­i­cat­ed social media team in place, devot­ed to pro­vid­ing an excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice, and such as in the case of Jet­Blue, have trans­ferred the exper­tise of a com­pa­nies estab­lished CS teams for into a social media set­ting. Han­dling con­sumer com­plaints well can have a huge­ly pos­i­tive impact for a brand.

Accord­ing to David Schnei­der, Come­dia, Twit­ter expert and co-founder of social media con­sul­tan­cy That Lot:

“A bad review or neg­a­tive com­ment can be retweet­ed by mil­lions, and com­pa­nies are often keen to defuse cus­tomer anger very quick­ly in a pub­lic space such as Twit­ter. If it is done clev­er­ly, it can even work in a com­pa­ny’s favor.”

Some­times all it takes is clever bit of think­ing to pro­vide con­sumers with the reas­sur­ance they are seek­ing, as well as rais­ing the aware­ness and per­cep­tion of a brand. This clas­sic tweet from @ArgosHelpers did more than win the “respect” of the dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer, it won the atten­tion of the media, and a bunch of new fol­low­ers.

While this may be an extreme exam­ple, it does illus­trate the key points brands should be aware with in stream­lin­ing cus­tomer sup­ports and com­plaints han­dling on social media.

Key Takeaways For Brands

1. Have a ded­i­cat­ed cus­tomer sup­port team on social media.
2. Con­sid­er run­ning a sep­a­rate sup­port chan­nel (e.g. @NikeSupport, @DeltaAssist).
3. Aim to respond to com­plaints with­in an hour.
4. Don’t obsess about KPIs.
5. Instead look to pro­vide val­ue, and allow your staff the license to use their ini­tia­tive.