The Customer is Always Right!

We are taught in our public relations classes that the formats of customer complaints have changed. We know that if a company has a Facebook page and customers complain on it but the company makes no comment, that’s a big no-no. In this changing social media world, an online presence is essential to a company’s customer service. Customers want to feel that a company is listening to them, and if that company refuses to answer to an online complaint, customers are more than happy to spread their anger all over the internet.

According to this article, a study was performed by Maritz Research Company. Maritz polled 1300 customers who had tweeted a complaint about a company or service. Out of those 1300 customers, only 1/3 were responded to. The article goes on to say that nearly half of the customers expected a response. Of those customers who received a followup on their complaint, 83% said they appreciated hearing from the company. Of those who did not get a followup, 86% said they would have loved to have heard a response from the company. This presents a large problem in the way that customer service is being handled.

The problem with this should be obvious. Customer feedback and customer service should be a number one priority for any company. It is embarrassing and harmful to a company’s reputation if they don’t respond to customer complaints. Netflix learned this when it began charging separately for DVDs and Instant Streaming. Angry customers flooded the company’s Twitter and Facebook pages and wrote hundreds of complaint comments. The company chose not to respond at all, which only fanned the flames. Netflix is still struggling to come back from that mistake, which could have been lessened or mitigated if they had only opened a line of communication with their customers. I’ve said it before, but it obviously bears repeating: in this day and age, companies must learn to play by the new rules. A complaints box just won’t cut it these days, and the ugly side of the internet is that a customer who doesn’t receive a response can spread that information everywhere. It’s not just bad PR, but simply a bad business tactic to ignore customer complaints, even if they’re only 140 characters long.