How to respond to customer complaints online

What strategy are you choosing? We suggest taking into account the results of a research on this topic.

The study showed that the negative effect of openly responding to complaints still outweighs the positive impact of such customer care. The study compared the weight of advertising and informational tweets of the company - and tweets with complaints, recorded changes in market value and consumer attitudes towards brands.

The study resulted in an assessment of the three most common online complaint handling strategies.

The first strategy is open responses to each complaint, responses to comments about the complaint, a completely open dialogue. For the study, companies were selected that process at least 75% of complaints this way.

The second strategy is to ignore complaints or delete them.

The third strategy is to respond to the complaint with one message, in which the author is invited to a discussion in a closed format. For the study, companies were selected that process 75% of online complaints in this way.

The third strategy won. It turned out that the more actively and quickly companies respond to complaints, the more they lose in their own value.

With the third strategy, feed scrollers see the company's reaction to the complaint, but the company's messages that are not related to complaints remain in view and are not overlaid with complaints dialogs. This is reasonable: communication on the company page should be conducted not only around complaints.