It would come as no surprise to you as a housing association, local authority or company if I said that I knew, with absolute certainty, your customer satisfaction levels are not 100%. In fact, I’d like to go even further and say that getting 100% is an impossible task – sure we strive to achieve it, but all it takes is just one missed call, just one missed message or a missed appointment and you can kiss that 100% goodbye.
However, you can go some way to getting a high customer satisfaction level with your customers who engage with you through social media.
As I wrote in my last post, you will get complaints, and it’s how you deal with those complaints that counts. In this post I’d like to bring your attention to our top five common complaints we get at Flagship Facebook and how we deal with them.
Common complaint #1) No one has called me to sort out my kitchen / bathroom / fence / boiler
Our customers will sometimes complain that they have not been called by our contractors or surveyors with regard to sorting out an issue in their homes. This type of complaint is the perhaps the most common, and perhaps the most helpful to us too – it points to an issue with which we can address with the party responsible directly.
Our reply is often along the lines of: “Hi XXX. I am sorry you have not been called. I have spoken to our XXXX who is aware of the situation and they will contact you to make an appointment to sort out what we need to do to resolve the matter. Thank you.”
Common complaint #2) I am still waiting for window / door / boiler to be replaced
Our customers also complain about being made to wait for work to be carried out in their homes. Depending on the situation (as each is different), it may be because planned work is not taking place in their area, or it could be that their community manager may have ‘dropped the ball’ through human error. In any case, an apology is offered.
Our reply is often along the lines of: “Hello XXXX. Sorry to hear of the difficulties. This should not have happened – I will get this looked into and someone will contact you with a full update. Thank you.”
Common complaint #3) There is rubbish in the garden / drain overflowing / fence knocked down / communal light broken
From time to time our customers complain about something outside of their homes. Nine times out of ten this can be solved with a simple post letting them know that their complaint has been acknowledged, and that that someone will deal with the matter.
Our reply is often along the lines of: “Hello XXXX. Thank you for informing us about this issue – I will log this for you now and your community manager will be in touch with you shortly.”
Common complaint #4) Flagship is rubbish / useless / awful etc…
Yes, the odd personal attack is sometimes posted on our wall and is probably the most feared out of all complaints. Getting to these type of complaints speedily is key – the longer you leave something like this, the more likely other friends are to click ‘like’, join the attack and post another complaint. In order to avoid a snowball effect, time is of the essence.
If the post violates our social media policy, ie it is defamatory, offensive, or names one of our employees by name, we remove it there and then and message the user asking them to refrain from doing so.
If the post is within our policy, whether fair or not, our reply is often along the lines of: “Hi XXXX, I am sorry you feel this way. We always XXXXXX, if you feel we have not treated you fairly please submit a formal complaint on our website, email XXX or write to XXXX. Thank you for your message.”
Common complaint #5) The photo complaint
A new theme emerging on our Flagship Facebook profile is customers uploading photos onto our wall. This has just started to occur within the last two months, and from memory the photos have been of issues such as poor scaffolding work, a neighbour’s messy garden and a damp problem.
Whilst these type of complaints are rare, they raise the interesting debate – should they be allowed? Are customers in effect ‘jumping the queue’ by posting them, trying to force us to act quickly? I’ll talk about this in a future post…
However, our reply to these sort of complaints is along the lines of: “Hello XXX, I am sorry you have had to deal with these problems. I have spoken to your community manager / our surveyor / contractor and you will be contacted <insert time>.”
To sum up..
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to dealing with complaints in public. Depending on what sort of complaint you get should define how you respond, but in general you need to act quickly and aim to get that “Thank you” reply from the person complaining as soon as you can.
As I said in the previous post:
Acknowledge the complaint – don’t ignore it and hope it goes away, or delete it and hope your customer won’t notice…believe me they will!
Apologise if it warrants one! Being humble and admitting your failings shows you are human. We all make mistakes, and learning from them and moving on by way of an apology is key.
Explain what went wrong – if it’s through no fault of your own, let them know you will be dealing with those responsible. If it is your fault, explain how it went wrong.
Tell them what you’re doing about it – even if it’s just to let them know you have logged it. People don’t want to be ignored – the more information you can give the better…
To conclude, dealing with complaints in public should not be something you should lose sleep over. As you can see we’ve managed to whittle the complaints on our wall down to a common five themes. In fact (touch wood) we haven’t had an incident whereby we’ve had to remove a post for being offensive, quite the opposite.
So my message would be to take the hit, take the complaints on the chin and respond positively. Nine times out of ten you’ll get a ‘Thanks’ back…maybe even a compliment from them a few days later….it may not be 100%, but I’d take 90% any day.
Social Media for Housing 