Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 217

are addressed the same business day that the issue was raised.
After you’ve identified an issue and made the first response, your next step is to determine
who in your company’s hierarchy is equipped to resolve the issue. Most important is to
realize that many different kinds of feedback loops exist, so where you route a concern
relates to the size and organization of your company. One of the most common feedback
loops is the customer service loop. When someone raises a customer service issue on
social media, the community manager can route that issue to the customer care department.
But you can structure all sorts of feedback loops. Perhaps a customer informs you of a
broken video on your blog. In this case, the community manager routes the issue to your
content team or, perhaps more specifically, to the managing editor of your blog.
Customers can have all sorts of technical issues with your products and often take to social
media with their frustrations. Addressing the concerns quickly and making sure that the
right people in your company know about the problem are the most important actions to
take.
By no means are feedback loops limited to the categories just mentioned. Perhaps your
legal team needs to be in the know on certain issues. Maybe your CEO wants to address
particular issues that people voice on social media. Or your products team may want to
know how customers are describing and feel about the characteristics of your products.
Regardless of the type of feedback loop that your community manager identifies, putting a
consistent response procedure in place is crucial. If a resolution is required to resolve the
issue, who responds to the customer — the community manager? The customer care team?
Or should you assign particular people in each department to handle responses?
Ultimately, the decision depends on what makes sense for your team. Just remember that in
a perfect world, a resolution should be presented to the customer within 24 hours of the
original complaint.
Many social listening tools are available to make this process much easier. Tools that we
mention earlier in this chapter, like Mention and Radian6, can equip your community
manager with live streams of social media alerts based on specialized keywords. These
platforms can also assign individual comments and tweets to specific members of your
team, making the feedback loop process easier to implement.
Handling customer service issues
The Internet makes it easy for upset customers to vent their frustrations publicly in the heat
of the moment. Whoever on your team is designated as social listener should be trained in
how to communicate with upset customers on the web. Here are three steps for a social
listener to follow when dealing with an upset customer on a public social media channel:
1. Respond in a timely manner.
Reply to the issue within a designated amount of time. If you can communicate a
resolution immediately, do so. Often, however, other people in your organization need