Blog by Natalie Martin, Founder of Kitch Media
Many companies adopt an email or contact us policy for customer complaints and feedback and some even direct them straight to Tripadvisor. Which is slightly worrying as there is no benefit of sending them to a third party site that means you can?t manage and respond in a way that is beneficial to your business. It also doesn?t feed your operations, marketing or social networks in any way and creates an impersonal approach to speak to your customers.
A recent article by the BBC last week; Are Twitter and Facebook changing the way we complain? Brought to light the importance of having teams in place to manage online feedback with consumers now seeing social channels as a direct way to complain or compliment. The survey conducted by Fishburn Hedges revealed that; 36% had used a social media platform to contact a big company and 65% of those surveyed said they believed social media was a better way to communicate with companies than call centres.
So, as a hospitality business we know that head-office or admin teams are sometimes off at the weekends and if you have a social media account where do you send the complaints to? After all, getting these comments offline as soon as possible is a must. PLus a five day running email address with no one to respond to it is opening you up to a ?bashtag?, whereby those that are unhappy with your brand will continue to tweet and post about your brand in a negative way.
Get a system in place that collects online feedback in a private way to your team that alerts the right operational team members that can respond to guests within a 12 hour period and up your online customer service skills.
The positive feedback from guests can then be used as content to fuel testimonials, Facebook, Twitter and enhance your data collection and customer service benchmarking. The Mystery Dining Company have a perfect example of this and with the right team members in place to run the personal customer service this can be the ideal solution to support them and refrain a ?bashtag? campaign against you.