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Changes in Social Media Messaging Settings Can Help Businesses Quell the Angry Customer Privately

While it’s true that social media has changed how customers interact with the businesses they patronize, the very-public interactions of bad customer service experiences have left companies rushing to put out nightmarish PR fires. There are certainly a lot of pluses to social media interaction between business and consumer, mostly for the consumer, as they are not left to deal with long lines or extended hold times. Companies are now tasked with hiring staff just to manage social interactions, but the problem with these is that they are left wide-open for the world to see, and when it gets ugly, bad news can spread like wild fire across the Internet.

There’s really no one particular way to deal with the vitriol that can occur on social media, but Twitter and Facebook (News - Alert) have changed their platforms ever so slightly to help businesses keep interactions private. Twitter has a direct message (DM) feature that only works if two people are following each other, so when a customer feels the need to engage in a 140 characters or less, they were forced to either do it publicly, or asked to be followed in order to take the conversation out of the public feed. Now Twitter (News - Alert) has removed the mandatory-follow feature so that customers and businesses can DM each other without having to take the extra step.

Meanwhile, Facebook has given businesses the ability to use Messenger so that customers can message directly instead of posting a screed for all fans to see. In fact, the social media company has touted this as a tool to “have personal, real-time conversations” with consumers.

This is a positive step for businesses that rely on social media to interact with their consumers, but it isn’t a perfect solution to a very public problem. Perhaps it will mitigate customer-service-as-a-spectator-sport, but it’s unlikely that poor customer experiences will disappear entirely from the online world. An angry customer might use every channel at their disposal, private or not, and so businesses need to not rest on their laurels when it comes to the customer experience.

The success of any company isn’t just measured in revenue dollars. The link between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty may be hard to quantify, but to ignore the channels available and the customer experience is not only foolish, it’s expensive. Sure, it’s harder to keep a positive spin when a customer goes public, but at least the changes in social media functionality will help quell the very public interactions.

Dissatisfaction amongst customers has a significant financial outcome for businesses, and by quantifying this particular impact, businesses can make the moves to correct and establish good customer service practices that will lead to increased revenue, customer retention and customer loyalty. 

Edited by Maurice Nagle