Customer Service

Retailers are stressed. Vendors are stressed. Reps are stressed.

And consumers are stressed. Think holiday seasons past were doozies to get through? Just imagine what a couple of months of purse string tightening will do to Patty Persnickety’s mood.

Used to be something you wrestled with in the store or on the phone. The cranky shopper would face off with you, providing an opportunity to turn things around and reclaim the relationship. Today, however, you might hear the grousing third person…or thirtieth person, depending on how web-savvy the cranky shopper is.

So what do you do if you suddenly becomes the target of flame throwing on a blog or consumer review site?

1. Read between the lines
Get to the post as fast as you can, then try to identify who the upset customer is. Most times, you’ll be able to figure it out fairly easily. Contact them directly, by phone to talk about the situation. Getting a human voice in the mix is critical to put out ongoing flames.

2. Post a comment with your (real) name signed to it
Be patient. Be calm. Validate their feelings (not the same as validating their complaint) by saying “I understand why this is frustrating to you,” or something along those lines. Then calmly deal with the issue. Apologize? Offer to discuss on the phone if they’d please call (assuming you don’t know their identity)? Explain why things went the way they did? Whatever is most appropriate, step up and do it.

3. If you have a blog of your own, include that address in your response
This gives you an opportunity to move the conversation onto familiar turf–yours. Create a blog post noting the complaint, then follow it with your response. Again, be calm and kind. End on an up note. You want to get ahead of this thing, not continue to chase it through someone else’s yard. With luck, the original poster will follow you there. (Note: If there are flames flying, might be wise to set your preferences to moderate posts before they appear.)

4. Google for spiders
Quite often, a blog post can show up in more than one place. Copy the first sentence of the angry post, then run it through Google, with quotation marks on either end. If it’s repeated somewhere else, this should find it. Be sure to repeat your signed response on any other blog that repeats the post. You want to put out all the fires, not just the first one.

5. Check the Terms of Use associated with the site
If the complaint is particularly viscious (ie, uses offensive language, is a personal attack, etc.), read the site’s Terms of Use to see if it crosses the line. If it does, contact the site owner immediately to bring their attention to the post. Could take a few weeks to get them to pull the thing, but the effort’s worth it for content that falls outside the lines.

6. Stay on top of the buzz
Google has a sweet little service called Google Alerts. Enter the name of your store, or your name, then sit back and wait. Whenever those names show up online, you get an email linking to the piece. Admittedly, this doesn’t troll all blogs-—but it does get some of them. And some is better than none.

Regardless of whether or not you find yourself in this kind of sticky spot, I strongly suggest enacting #6. It’s always good to know when your name shows up in print.

Photo credit: RozzleDozzle

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