Read more about Social Media
Social media is one public space where anyone can express their opinion on virtually anything. If a customer comes under your business page to talk poorly of your brand, it could prove destructive to you and to all your efforts. However, you can turn a negative comment into an opportunity to rebuild the image of your brand and make amends. You need to understand that only people who care about your brand will think of leaving comments under your posts. As loyal customers, some of them will make negative remarks when they encounter a snag in the quality of your brand. So they complain because they are interested in the services you render and hope that they would find a reason to patronize you when you eventually fix the problem. Some others might just be people looking to provoke you and taint the good image of your brand. This set of people is known online as “trolls” because they spend their time using social media and other public outlets to give people and brands bad reputations. Whoever they are and whatever negative thing they are saying about hour business, the wise thing to do is to restrain yourself from responding negatively to them. Aside from suppressing the urge to respond negatively to trolls, you also need to desist from ignoring negative comments. Once they are made, hundreds of people are going to view them and there is nothing you can do about it. In addition, you do not have to delete them. If you do so, people are going to point it out and hold it against you when a similar situation occurs in the future. You should not discredit their complaints nor should you insult them.
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Now you know what to avoid when handling a negative comment, what then should you do? Below are the steps to follow when dealing with any negative comment:
- Keep your cool. Be professional and do not take the complaints personally. You have to stay calm if you want your customers to respect you and not waver their support for you.
- Give an apology. Where you are the one at fault or the other person is framing you for something mistaken, always sincerely apologise.
- Try to be personally invested in the person’s unpleasant situation by requesting their contact information.
- Show that you want to help them and it is in your interest to solve the problem. Pay attention to the details of their complaints.
- When you have discovered what the problem is and how it came to be, you should make sure to fix it so that it does not happen again.
- Reach out to them on your findings and try to offer a refund or a free service. You can follow up afterwards to ensure that they are not encountering any more problems.
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