I’ve talked before about answering your social phone. It’s the idea that you’re paying attention to all the social media channels that may be talking about you and your company, and then engaging the people who are talking about you…whether they’re saying something good or bad. I saw an email come in over the weekend that was a correspondence between one of my clients and an upset customer. The customer had a series of very frustrating experiences with my client and chose to Tweet about all of them. Fortunately, the client answers their social phone.

The thing about answering the social phone is that once you decide to answer it, you have some decisions to make about how you’ll respond. Will you be defensive? Will you try to appease? Will you provide some kind of response that feels stale and impersonal? If any of those are your planned response, just go ahead and don’t answer the social phone to begin with. You need to be ready to engage and respond. Sometimes that means you need to explain things you cannot control. Sometimes it means you need to kindly disagree with the person. Sometimes it means you just need to show that you’re genuinely sorry.

That’s what the client did in this case…he was sorry…and it was a beautiful thing. Here’s part of the email from my client to the customer after an initial Tweet and request for an email explaining the whole situation.

“Hey man. Thanks for taking the time to email me. Let me first just say, “I’m Sorry.” I truly am sorry that it is hard to find what you’re looking for. I’m sorry that the associates there don’t seem to know what’s going on. I’m sorry we weren’t any help online. I’m sorry for the whole experience. I know how frustrating it is to take time out of your day only to get less than stellar service.”

How about that? Isn’t that the kind of response you would love from any company that provided an frustrating experience for you? In this case my client apologized and then started resolving the situation by notifying the appropriate people within the company. In fact, the customer’s complaint even alerted the company to a product ordering oversight they didn’t know about.

If you’re wondering whether this meant anything to the customer, then check out a little bit from his response…

I am floored that you picked up my twitter and actually by this whole email exchange! I was curious if I’d hear a response from you. I’m really glad I did! It’s removed the bad taste from my mouth of what happened. I appreciate the TIME you’ve spent following up with a twitter and these emails! I hope YOUR manager knows the difference you’re making for [company's] reputation to their customers! I will talk about THIS experience much more than my bad one. I promise!

The power of being genuinely sorry can begin to resolve even some of the worst mistakes and biggest frustrations.

Tags: responding in social media, social media monitoring, social phone, twitter

This entry was posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:08 am and is filed under social media, social media monitoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.