It doesn’t matter how high-quality your products are, sometimes, the standard of your customer service can define your customers’ perception of your brand. You might have been able to master customer service in-store, but have you mastered it cross-channel? Unfortunately, customer service complaints spread like wildfire, particularly across social media, so if you’re not fully-equipped to take on cross-channel customer service, there’s no need to worry…
Train your customer service staff
This might seem like a basic point, but a lot of staff overseeing social media, customer enquiries via email and even in-store, have not been trained how to appropriately deal with complaints. Your customer service staff are your frontline, dealing directly with the customers on a daily basis.
You should think about creating a brand guideline PDF document, highlight brand tone of voice, what’s acceptable, what’s not acceptable and most importantly, the procedure for complaints.
Encourage staff to share feedback
It’s important to encourage internal communication through staff feedback in general, but it’s particularly important to obtain it from your customer service staff members. Why? Well, they can see the effect your strategies are having on your customers. Being able to proactively feedback customer complaint patterns etc. it’s so important in order to consistently inform your ever-changing strategy.
Remember, you need to make sure your products are received well by your target market, and if they’re not loving them and specifically telling you they don’t love them, then you need to utilise this free feedback. This sort of data can cost a lot of money when using market research methods!
Resolve the complaints
If your customer has chosen to contact you via Twitter to complain, that’s because it’s most convenient for them, so why would you then email them a response? You’re encouraging your customers to contact you via multiple channels, so you need to try and manage the complaint in the customer’s chosen channel.
If you do pass them through different channels to get their answer, not only is this generally poor complaint management, but on the outset, your brand departments look like they’re just passing the book. Obviously, some complaints need to be passed through a different channel, so in this case communicate clearly with the customer through their chosen channel about the procedure they’re going to be passed through.
Struggling with social media management? Contact our team today. You can call us on, 0800 011 9715.
