On May 15 of this year a picture of a severely injured three-year-old girl with an eye patch went viral. The accompanying text was an irate message from the girl’s grandmother claiming that the girl had been asked to leave a Kentucky Fried Chicken because she was “scaring the other customers” due to her unsightly injuries. KFC then faced a string of backlash both online and offline, with some people even throwing drinks on their staff through drive-through windows.
The management at KFC handled the situation perfectly, offering to donate $30,000 to the girl’s medical expenses and responding to all Twitter users’ backlash with patience and alacrity. Even after a subsequent independent investigation revealed the story was probably a publicity hoax to raise money, KFC decided to honour its promise and donate toward the girl’s medical expenses. This was a prime example of how to effectively deal with negative publicity on social media. KFC was quick to respond, offered reparation, set up an investigation, and it continued to respond to all users afterward.
From the outside, this may seem relatively seamless and straightforward, but KFC’s response was the result of already having systems in place to deal with emergencies like this. Their staff managing accounts would all have had a well-documented and consistent policy, and their upper management clearly recognised the importance of having a centrally planned, consistent message across all channels. I have seen many companies with very poor communication between their public relations staff and their social media staff, creating huge potential for contradictory statements. A business is more than the sum of its parts and it is a manager’s job to ensure consistency and cohesion.
In most cases, and especially for small to medium enterprises, any problem can be mitigated far earlier and prevented from escalating with the right policies in place. The most important thing is to avoid getting emotional and to handle everything in a professional manner. Avoid typing the first thing that comes into your head. When you do face a negative comment, move quickly but calmly. The importance of a swift response cannot be overstated. First, assess the comment for two factors: validity and tone. These will determine how you should respond.
Validity
Be honest with yourself and really ask if there is validity to the complaint. This is especially hard to do if you are the business owner and deeply engrossed in the day to day. Nonetheless, you must view this as an opportunity to show off that you are customer-focused and willing to improve.
If their comment has some validity, apologise publicly and acknowledge your error. Then offer to make it up to them by giving them a heavily discounted or free product in order to show you value their patronage. Once you reach an amicable public position, sort out the details privately.
If their comment is frivolous, apologise for their dissatisfaction. Then contact them privately and ask how you can improve in future. In some cases, you may want to give them a discounted product or service to reduce enmity on their side. Whether or not this is fair, it may be a strategically intelligent path forward. Perhaps you could give a minor discount that reduces your profit margins without amounting to a net loss. Note that some customers are just plain difficult and may put you in the position of choosing between your staff and them. In rare cases when a customer is extremely stubborn and costing you time and causing stress, maybe you should take a leaf out of the book of former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher: “The customer is sometimes wrong. We don’t carry those sorts of customers. We write to them and say, ‘Fly somebody else. Don’t abuse our people.’”
Tone
The tone of a complaint can range from polite and civil through to outright abusive. It’s important to assess the severity of their comment to determine how to respond. Some customers may venture toward aggressive language, but with delicate handling can be brought back to behaving courteously. Others may need a more firm response or even none at all.
The way to deal with abuse is heavily dependent on the social network. If it is on Facebook or LinkedIn, you can block a user from posting. Twitter, on the other hand, is the Wild West. In the aforementioned example with KFC, people on Twitter were calling them Nazis. Naturally KFC did not respond because these messages were beyond the pale of reasonable discourse. If possible, it is always preferable to move extremely heated conversations to private messaging and do everything you can to defuse their anger. If the comment is very abusive, you may choose to ignore it. Delete and block these sorts of messages if possible. Always be courteous and polite regardless of how abusive someone gets.
Learning for the future
After you have dealt with a complaint, it is a good opportunity to wait a while and then look at what went wrong and how you could prevent it in future. Even if the customer was in the wrong, maybe you could qualify your leads better or put policies in place that weed out troublesome clients earlier in your sales cycle.
Social media is an amazing tool and can be mined for people’s perceptions about your brand. Conversations about your brand are taking place every day and you have an opportunity to weigh in and turn those negatives into positives. Tools you can use to see what’s happening outside of your page include Google Alerts for monitoring mentions on the web and Social Mentions for monitoring social network activity. Don’t let these conversations take place without you there to guide them. Trial by social media happens quickly, but if you respond quickly you can substantially mitigate the backlash and turn it into another opportunity to show that you care about your customer.
Let me know in the comments below: What sorts of social media backlash have you faced and how did you deal with it?
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About the Author:
Paul Zubrinich is the co-founder and head of online marketing at Little Web Giants, and a specialist in increasing revenue through online channels.
