To save you having to read it all, if you don’t want to, here’s a quick summary of what follows beneath about how to use social media to complain publicly and shame the company involved in your bad customer experience (CX).
- Use Twitter, including @company in your tweet to reach those responsible for managing social media in the business concerned, and #company to tell the world which company is your subject.
- Where there is an arbitration body, ombudsman or media interested in overseeing that company’s business, copy it in, too, using its @company as above.
- Where you know the Twitter identity of the CEO or a responsible senior executive who uses it, use their “handle” – for example, @john.ceo – to make sure it reaches them.
- Use LinkedIn to identify who are that business’s senior executives, then make an effort to discover their email address to write a powerful letter of complaint to as many of them as you can reach. This might take some patience, but you can find some handy tools and tips to do this here and some more here.
- Copy any or all of the above in a post to your account at LinkedIn and Facebook.
- And, please email Shonkr and/or copy me in on Twitter @ShonkrCom.
The following is the original, fuller content of this post.
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Please note that if you use the following guidance to tweet in anger or frustration at the rotten experience you have with a company, please don’t forget to copy me in by including @ShonkrCom somewhere in your tweet.
I won’t report on, or get caught up in, the detail, but I will report and link to its existence. Then, the more links your grievance receives, the more notice will be taken, the more importance it gains and, therefore, the more damage you can do to that organisation’s attempts to attract future new customers and sales.
You don’t have to use this formula, of course, but whichever path you choose, please copy me in. Although I won’t and can’t get involved in individual battles, I can report the fact of your own complaint to deter others from doing business with your target organisation.
Just use Twitter to write something like: “@ShonkrCom @organisation #organisation gave me one of the worst experiences of my life as a customer,” and through this, we can build the list of businesses to avoid.
When they stop getting new customer enquiries, maybe they will start to get the idea that perhaps CX matters, after all. @ShonkrCom
Please also note this, as it is MOST IMPORTANT. For your own protection, please remember, whilst it is ok to badmouth a company, do not, under any circumstances, name any individual in anything you publish online. Certainly, go as close to that line as you can, as it should always be made evident to its leaders which of its people are causing its problems, but never cross it. Individuals can sue for defamation, where, generally speaking, most of the businesses we get most angry about, which are likely to comprise more than 10 employees, can’t.
Ok, onwards. When, as a customer, companies fail me, I use my Twitter and Facebook accounts to attack and draw public attention to those businesses unable to deliver the customer experience (CX) I expect.
Businesses that run customer management operations to manage customer dissatisfaction typically give them no teeth nor any authority, as all they do is bring bad news to their managers.
Those working in such positions therefore suffer the pain of having to deal with the angry customers their employers have mistreated or ripped off, but are then ignored within their own workplaces.
Yet, this function should be among those requiring the greatest investment in a socially connected world. This is where every business’s future wisdom, wealth and potential advantage lies.
It is also where their reputation, and that of those running them, is most vulnerable.
So, here is how I put the boot in, when I am a disappointed customer.
And, I believe an angry customer should never let their target off the hook until their grievance is resolved.
Create the vehicle of complaint
Because we now have available the web, Twitter and Facebook, there need be no cost, other than time and mental energy, to mount a potent campaign of complaint against a bad company.
That said, to create and post my own tweets, because I know how and it makes my own work easier, I use a database, created in Apple’s Filemaker Pro application.
When composing, at the front of each tweet, I insert the @ symbol to ensure that when I post, my tweet reaches the attention of those paid to manage the social media affairs of the business in question. Then, I use the #company format to ensure it is searchable by others out on the web.
In addition, where there is an arbitration, ombudsman or media entity that needs to know what those companies in its industries are up to, I include that organisation’s Twitter handle with the @ symbol at the front of the message.
This step ensures my target knows it is being watched not just by the public that uses Twitter, Facebook or Reddit, but by those reporting on and monitoring its industry – those capable of shaping its reputation.
To illustrate this, here is a sample of a post I recently contributed to Twitter and Facebook concerning the disastrous service I have been given by Telstra, which is possibly, in my experience, Australia’s worst organised major business. (Optus is also a disaster, in my experience, and iiNet even worse.)
SMALL BUSINESSES, YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO BECOME #Telstra VICTIMS. @Telstra @andy_penn @whirlpoolnetau How bizarre is #Telstra’s incompetence. SMS yesterday tells me I have no new charges and am in credit, but it is yet to connect us after we moved home-office. I moved Oct 30.
In this example, @andy_penn is the company’s managing director and @whirlpoolnetau, with 898,179 registered members, is arguably Australia’s most influential medium for those interested in understanding the experiences of others when choosing or considering switching a broadband service provider.
Importantly, my database also enables me to count the characters in each tweet or post as I type to ensure I don’t exceed Twitter’s 280-character limit. (It is also possible to use Google Docs to count a tweet’s characters by using its Tools > Word count function, and I am sure this functionality must be available in the many other word processing and similar applications I don’t use for this purpose.)
Using a “script” I have built in Filemaker (for which no raw coding is required, just the stitching together of a series of pre-built steps, I am then able, in sequence, to copy its content and automatically to launch the URL to which I wish to post it, so that all I have then to do when I arrive at the relevant site is to paste it.
My database creates a record of each post, with a timestamp, which enables me to reuse or modify a previous message and to track the precise timeline of my communications to or about a company, should I, as a journalist, wish to write a longer subsequent account.
Where necessary – such as when a social media representative tries to exert their power by ignoring, or worse, by attempting to bully me to keep me quiet (also useful when writing that longer account, as the timestamped record makes it hard for a representative to deny their presence at the wheel when dishing out rotten service to an aggrieved customer) – I then pursue an email correspondence with the identified directors or senior managers of the company in question.
Next step: Identify and approach the responsible managers in the company concerned
For this purpose, my database allows me to run a script that enables me to launch and run a search, by using Google, or similar, on the company and executive by creating a record of the organisation’s name plus job title using the format “LinkedIn Australia + organisation name + job title.”
As no executive can resist being found on LinkedIn, this inevitably brings up both the individual with whom I will need to communicate, as well as those with whom they work, and those listed in other organisations performing similar roles who are their peers in rival businesses. Of course, where companies name their internal leaders on their own web sites, this effort is made easier. However, the additional benefit of this is that it enables me to offer those competitors a competitive advantage by drawing attention to the CX weaknesses of the business that is my target.
In searching down such executives to make contact, I have also developed the scripting capability of my database to identify the email format a business uses. By launching Google and pasting into it the abbreviated form of its URL it uses as @companyname, I can discover that format by identifying individuals within a company whose personal details can be found on the web. Once I have the company email address format, I can then use this in subsequent emails to those who are my actual communication targets.
This can still be a laborious process. Accepting that companies often use their own address permutations within the @companyname format – with possible combinations including john.smith@companyname, johnsmith@companyname, or jsmith@companyname, for example – this may take some experimentation to get right, until an email address no longer bounces back.
This being so, I think you may be best advised in finding and testing all the possible alternatives to try using an “email permutator.” A search on the web should yield many alternatives to this, but this one seems to do the job sufficiently: https://analyzeid.com/email-permutator/
Even this doesn’t guarantee I’ve reached the target, of course, as even when using such strategies, individuals may still filter all the emails they receive to ensure they don’t get anything unwanted.
Using the Telstra example above, knowing how many pissed-off customers it would have complaining, it used the “@team.telstra.com” format to deflect most users who wouldn’t have known this, even if they’d had their target’s name.
When you need to land a punch, give your headline the necessary impact
As everyone reads the headline of an email before they decide whether to open, dismiss or delete a message, a failed headline is a failed complaint.
This is why, if it matters to you to get the attention of the managers whose attention you seek to attract, it is worth getting this right by spending time on it. And clearly, it is pointless to try to find the names of executives to hound with your demands unless you get the message right to attract their attention in the first place.
As I demonstrated satisfactorily by getting an email reply within minutes of sending both my first and then my follow-up message to Shemara Wikramanayake, the chief executive at Macquarie Bank, who should clearly have better things than to respond to angry individual customers, my headlines clearly cut through and made all the difference in my attack. Moreover, because the solution she provided first time around failed so spectacularly, the second one simply had to work to get me off her back and out of her inbox.
But, most importantly, it got me the resolution I wanted from the beginning. God only knows why Macquarie was so slow and inept in delivering it up to that point.
To test my headlines, I have put to use a free headline-testing site, Sharethrough Headline Analyzer (https://headlines.sharethrough.com/). I believe it is designed more to help people writing to attract readers to their blog and social posts, but, at minimum, it is worth using it to practice when you want to get your message right.
Another useful reference resource for creating the body of your message is How To Make Your Next Blog Post Better by publisher of the For The Interested newsletter, Josh Spector. Again, it’s not written directly as an instruction to complainers, but it will help you think your process through to make your messages stick. It is here: http://fortheinterested.com/better-blog-post/
None of the above guarantees redress, of course, but if you don’t try to get the target business’s attention, you are never likely to get anything back.
But it does ensure the avoidance of formal complaint channels in which as a disappointed customer, you are almost certain to be ignored, fobbed off and almost certainly become more disappointed.
But, when you go public and get serious about alerting a company’s competitors to the opportunities this represents for them, there is a stronger possibility of creating positive change in its attitude towards you.
And again, please note that if you use the guidance above to tweet in anger or frustration at the rotten experience you have with a company, please don’t forget to copy me in by including @ShonkrCom somewhere in your tweet. (Alternatively, connect with me via LinkedIn or by joining the Shonkr group at LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14198799/).
Again, that way, I can link to it from here, and, because the more links it receives, the more importance it gains, and, therefore the more damage you can do to that organisation’s reputation, by causing it to lose future customers, and sales.
And that really is the point, if we demand better, more responsive customer service, delivered by companies designed to do so, and we want to get rid of those companies that can’t or won’t, this is surely one way we can do it.