As an individual who finds himself easy to please most times I do find myself in situations where communicating with businesses as a willing consumer turns difficult. One such situation had to do with a vendor for custom embroidered and print clothing that's typical of what people look for when getting uniforms for a club, team, or any organized group. So as not to preserve any suspense the issue that arose was eventually resolved but in no way for the lack of effort it took to reach the customer service people responsible for remedying the problem. Further, the problem wasn't that complicated: a couple of shirts were missing some lettering. It was a puzzling mistake considering all the other ones were correct but I'm a reasonable guy, these things happen. And it's here that I would humbly accept fault for my lack of due diligence...I focused a lot more on the price and flashy pictures than further researching the company. It turned out that they have a reputation for being unresponsive when issue come up. They have a customer service number but it goes straight to their voicemail, an email that is not promptly replied, and a chat feature that is not often attended. Eventually, they decided to email me back with a tracker number for the extra shirts but it was definitely quite the trial.
Taking the above account as an example, when I finally got the sense to look at the reviews on their Facebook page, they did teach me that I should have perhaps done more research into other companies. This tells me a couple things about the utility of social media: on the one hand, it is easy to get a problem noticed but to actually get it resolved is sort of another monster. This company had many complaints about the timeliness and completeness of orders that looked to have spanned quite a long time. This leads me to believe that they were not paying very much attention to these reviews. However, many companies do vary in their responsiveness to certain platforms that likely depends on where their target market actually resides; they may not get a lot of the patrons from solid Facebook users. Additionally, the choice to invest in solving the problems that arise from complaints is also a consideration. Would the company lose too much money investing in more reliable processes or hiring more customer service representatives? If they had to increase prices to do these things, would the better service offset the loss of what lured me in the first place: low prices?
My more positive communications with businesses over social media have been more subtle. Since most of my investment of social media is reserved for casual use, I tend not to leave reviews for products on platforms not specifically aligned toward that end. For instance, I do like to leave Yelp reviews for places that I really like. This encourages the business and customers who are in agreement to support the reviews with likes and I become a more reputable reviewer and the business is more popular for it. Subtly still, I often times add location markers to my tweets and may plug the business that I'm at with a positive quip, usually at coffee shops.
If this were my own business, I think it would be important to first establish what are the best avenues to solve issues and be prompt in doing so. All the while, it is important that I remain transparent and completely sincere which customers tend to appreciate. This way if there are positive comments I can continue the good service that led to them and honor it with a repost or throwing in something extra for that consumer. On the other hand, if its negative than I would be encouraged to figure out where the miscommunication or mistake was, remedy it, and make it known that I have done so. I feel like through this process you can also get a feel for when I business is doing what it can and when a customer is being unreasonable.
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