How to manage angry customers on social media Determine if you should respond, ignore, or delete. Choose to address your conversation publicly or privately. Unfortunately, companies are notoriously bad at dealing with complaints in a timely manner. If you can break the cycle and respond quickly, you'll be able to differentiate yourself from other competitors in your industry and keep difficult customers happy.
Just because your difficult customers are angry enough to report you in public doesn't mean that you're going to feel comfortable addressing the topic in such an exposed forum. However, while you might want to move the conversation offline or to private emails, it's important that you respond publicly. Using negative language during an interaction with an angry customer is a great way to light the fuse in an already explosive situation. Instead, carefully craft your answers using positive language to jumpstart the conversation and steer it toward a satisfactory resolution.
Introducing positive language into the interaction tells the customer that you're happy to help and that you want to work together to achieve a positive solution. In addition, whether you monitor your social media channels for customer questions or not, rest assured that your customers will contact you there, which can have significant consequences for your company. Ideally, you should contact the customer privately after the review has been published, as personal information will most likely be required. For a support agent, few things can ruin your day faster than answering a call and hearing an angry customer start venting on the other side.
It's reasonable to assume that most consumers use at least one form of social media on a regular basis. In addition, when you create your customer service offer on a channel-by-channel basis, this often results in a negative customer experience. Even a very brief response where you simply acknowledge the customer's position is better than not responding at all. If the complaint is from a legitimate customer or customer and you have contact information, pick up the phone and deal with it directly.
This personal approach can help to allay some of the anger your client feels and let them know that someone is listening to their concerns. Other people will read the complaint on social media, so provide instructions in response to the complaint that others can use to learn more. The only thing worse than ignoring your difficult customers on the Internet is responding to their concerns with a corporate copy-and-paste response. This makes the customer feel that they are a valuable part of your business and can help improve problems that, otherwise, you didn't know existed.
An angry customer is likely to have had a negative experience with your product, service, or company in general. In a live conversation, you might not have much time to review a script before responding to the caller.
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