When your customer turns into an anti-brand-evangelist

If I’ve mostly shared here the lessons I’ve learned, then today I’d like to bring up a topic that I don’t know how to solve yet – an angry screaming customer.

As long as customers used to scream offline directly at company reps and complained to a few friends of colleagues, it was still unpleasant and sometimes felt unfair but nothing compared to a customer screaming on social media in front of thousands of other (potential) customers.

All marketers – I’d like to hope – know that participating in social media has it’s risks. Actually the risks are there even when a company doesn’t have official presence so it makes sense to leave yourself a possibility to defend yourself and solve some problems – therefor be present.

This year I have been responsible for managing a Facebook page for the UK and Irish organisation. I’ve read my fair share of relevant articles and recommendations for using social media for a company’s advantage but there seems to be no concrete course of action how to always succeed.

Among planning and posting strategically and regularly about our area, we gained quite a lot of positive engagement but also one super not fan. There were, of course, also some other upset customers but answering politely, apologizing for their discomfort and offering to send an expert changed to mood of most of them 180 degrees.

In all honesty, that one guy’s issues had nothing to do with our social media behavior. It just seemed that he had decided to scare away as many other potential customers of ours as possible. And, he was attacking our flagship product.

Every once in a while I’d see the same name leaving furious comments about how product X was awful, he hates it and doesn’t recommend it to anyone. He’d leave those comments under any post even remotely related to the product he was disappointed in.

I had a delicate situation in hand and had to think carefully how to make it better and at any cost not worse. That meant that I couldn’t risk pissing him off even more. At the same time I got pressured by scared sales colleagues, who had also seen his comments, to just erase those. That, however, was not recommended in all those articles I had read.

It would have taken just a couple of clicks to erase a comment and pretend that it was never there but I had no guarantee that he wouldn’t write just a new, even angrier one and gain more negative attention.

I also had to factor in that the rest of our followers might have already noticed the conflict and were also interested to see how it will be resolved. They might have noticed the censorship and if before they might have thought that Mr X is a bit crazy, then erasing all traces of him might have looked like we had something to hide.

I decided to keep his comments and answer publicly. I always tried to answer to him fast and politely, apologize for causing his negative feelings – but not admitting guilt until proven guilty – and suggested continuing solving his issues via private messages while lifting the issues in attention of the colleagues responsible.

In his case, my colleagues agreed that we must do something and agreed to send an expert to visit him but they also said that a big part of the problem is the customer himself. The product that he was complaining about is technically quite complex and requires some skills and knowledge for successful use. He didn’t seem to have enough. Another question is whether it should have been sold to him at all and whether the risks were obvious from the start. But he had managed to purchase it, couldn’t get it to work as well as he expected and I couldn’t tell him that he’s just too stupid to handle it. How unprofessional would that have looked? I bet that he would have just become angrier and screamed louder then.

So we kept playing the same game every other month or so. He lashed out under a random Facebook post. I tried to remain as polite and professional as possible and let him know that we hear and care and will try to help. He might have replied once more but never completely calmed down.

At least I managed to avoid increasing the engagement on those discussions – no-one else joined and therefor the posts with his negative comments became history quite fast instead of lingering around on the walls of our customers and their friends.

Perhaps someone else became a bit more skeptical but I hope that all other positive engagement and my professional replies rather improved our image as an open and helpful company.

Have you ever been in a situation like this and how did you solve it?