Drawbacks of engaging with customer complaints on Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Drawbacks of engaging with customer complaints on Twitter

hbr.org

47 pointsgxs48 comments

I've only ever engaged on Twitter when companies do not provide an avenue for direct customer support in private, but this has become more and more important over the years. Twitter provides a platform for public shaming; if the company directs you to a private channel and doesn't respond effectively there, you can report back publicly that the company has failed to respond. The situation may be changing, but in the past this has resulted in internal escalation and my problem was resolved in a way that was not possible through official private channels (if those even existed).

IMO the best way to avoid publicly advertising when you've failed a customer is to provide a clear and effective private avenue for complaint resolution. Most people who are looking for a resolution will only resort to social media complaints when they're desperate, either because they can't figure out how to get help or they are being denied help and/or communication.

It’s an arms race of bad faith complaints leading to watered down responses, and mediocre responses leading to faux-outraged complaints, all involving a peanut gallery of online haters.

I agree with avoiding publicity (in this sense e.g by replying to online complaints or attacks, other than to redirect to a private channel), though I don’t like it.

When is a bad faith complaint not actually intelligence gathering to see what behind the scenes or non public safety/security measures they have in place to ensure they dont fall foul of bad faith complaints?

Social Media is a classic "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" spook ideology turned on the business sector, and various coping strategies are highlighted in this article.

I prefer to use Twitter over email for customer support inquiries because it creates a public record for others to discover similar to the Q&A section of product detail pages on e-commerce sites. I may not need to ask a support question at all if the answer is already provided via a Twitter search.

Oddly, this works for most things...except Twitter support itself, which is so opaque it leaves every user feeling like Helen Keller.

Is there a niche for a website like stackoverflow but for customer complaints? If not then I call dibs

BBB.org in the US. IIRC, businesses need to pay to respond on the platform, so it sort of feels like extortion.

BBB has not been relevant for at least a couple decades, certainly not since the internet came around.

Have you tried contacting the BBB and been underwhelmed at the impact that had? Or have you never filed a complaint with them?

I do not know anyone that would consider contacting them for anything, nor do I know any business owners that would care if someone did contact them. Google reviews/yelp/TripAdvisor/twitter/etc reviews seem much more impactful. Or a chargeback with payment card company is the problem is really serious.

I mean - there are billions of tools out there and you can't be expected to personally vet all of them - but if my experience in leveraging the BBB has been quite fruitful and your experience is just a lack of any interactions then doesn't it make sense that you might be clinging to ignorance in this instance?

how would people use it? if i have a complaint i would search for other people making the same complaint? even if it's something like "my burger was cold"?

The other customer would know it wasn't a one-off issue and feel more justified airing their grievances in a public forum since it may be a systemic issue. If a burger king location served a burger cold once in thirty years of operations yea I still want a replacement burger but it's no biggie - if it does that dozens of times a day their corporate image deserves to be dragged through the mud.

When it's a restaurant we regularly patronize we can offer the feedback directly with confidence about the severity, when it's something we use once in a blue moon (like an airline for most of us) we don't know if that poor service was basically par for the course.

I still don't understand why you can't see the "@s" from a Twitter accounts page.

It feels like you're shouting into the void unless you're Twitter famous. Why should I have to get a second job growing an online fanbase just to not get screwed over?

I think you can see mentions in the search; it’s how I have sought out complaint posts.

> We found that the more a firm responded to complaints, the more likely it was to fall in both value and in perceived brand quality.

Could someone with access to the actual paper tell me if they instead meant firms that responded through public strategies versus firms that responded through closed strategies? This sentence implies, rather, that firms that received more complaints fall in value and brand quality (duh).

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/002224292110021...

In many scenarios, an issue that had already been abandoned / denied by technical support is suddenly picked up and fixed when I raise a stink on Twitter. For that reason I appreciate its existence

In ~2015 we had AT&T fiber installed at our co-working space, AT&T had just pumped tons of money into rolling out fiber because Google had recently announced they were coming to our city. The guy who did the install had never done one before and he didn't mount it to the building correctly.

The fiber line snapped and fell to the ground within 8 hours of being installed, I called the AT&T support line and was stuck in a recursive IVR menu where it was literally impossible to get ahold of anyone. After our admin tried emailing, calling the tech directly, calling 6-7 different support trunk numbers and got no response (or was routed back to the blackhole IVR line) we were without internet for 36 hours.

I tweeted the picture of the broken fiber cable and had all the members retweet, we got a response within 5 mins and had someone out within 4 hours.

I just jump straight to twitter now in _most_ CS cases with large companies.

I am disappointed there is no discussion of the morality of the research and article.

This seems like a morally bankrupt justification for corporate totalitarianism. The goal of the article isn't to help solve customer problems, it's to reduce costs and maximize profits in any way legally possible.

Twitter has plenty of "moral outrage" spam and complaints that really are not customer service issues, and I am sympathetic to not engaging in that kind of advocacy and those kinds of complaints, but often customers have real issues that "customer dis-service" often fails to remediate, and if there's no other option but "alternative means", then those means are justified in the name of producing consumer benefit.

> We found that the more a firm responded to complaints, the more likely it was to fall in both value and in perceived brand quality

I'd bet large sums of money the habits of customer support twitter accounts have zero effect on market cap (lol) or perceived brand quality among the general public (not enough people use twitter and pay attention to brand account behaviors to effect this metric)

Makes sense to me.

Tweeting is about the lowest-effort type of engagement you can get. It represents maybe 10 seconds of someone's time, and should be valued accordingly. It is unverifiable, and appeals to whiners, attention-seekers, scammers, astro-turfers and other people you'd rather not have around. Why give it any credibility by responding?

I think folks who grew up on the internet are unaware of the awesome power wielded by the better business bureau and see Twitter as a last ditch effort to extract accountability from companies. This is quite fair since a lot of companies have massively scaled back their CS in terms of revenue expenditure on labour (hiring cheap overseas call centers or "helpful AI") and in terms of the unexpected costs those departments are allowed to raise - unless you seriously make the person on the other end of the phone's life hell you're not getting a replacement part.

As a result they turn to twitter where, historically, companies are so shamed by the outcry and tempted by the PR potential that they quickly give in to demands for whatever the customer asks. The BBB is an amazingly effective way to signal to a company (and to all of their large customers) that their CS is absolute trash and underinvested - but, that said, shouting on twitter is easier.

This article seems to miss the biggest point though - outside of the small segment of rabid twitter users, nobody gives a damn what's going on there except for the occasional meme that makes it over to Reddit. I have no idea why companies would be concerned with their "brand presence" on twitter - practically nobody who isn't going to complain about you is going to see any of that.

No one cares about BBB these days.

I disagree - BBB will get you a response pretty darn quickly. It's a pretty common B2B rating platform so most businesses take their image there a lot more serious than twitter.

Just because it's not a post-tech boom company doesn't mean it's irrelevant now that we've got the internet.

US-centric advice.

Also Canada where I'm at - but yes.

Shaming companies into doing the right thing with customer service was literally the reason I got a Twitter account, and for a decent time (a year, perhaps more) that's all I had it for, but I gradually got used to using it for other things.

The whole "reply here" thing is always so obvious, you know companies suggesting it are going to be useless at least half the time. It's a big factor in those companies that I blacklist.

No doubt it's fairly hard for companies to figure out "voting with your feet" scenarios driven by idiotic support, unless they listen to the tone of voice going from friendly to concealed rage!

The other thing that's similar to this is the company reminding you that actually they are crap because they've sent you a survey. I've had quite a few cases with companies where I've basically forgotten how bad they were (thus effectively forgiven them) and then they send a survey asking to rate their service, and crucially when it asks why I chose a rating, it'll all flood back and then I go from so-so to never do business with them again!

Encouraging companies to embrace accountability was part of my motivation for working on FeatureAsk.com. Addressing customer complaints simply seems like an extension on it.

I feel like if 10% (or x% where x is subjective) of your users are asking for a feature that shouldn't be too intensive for you to build, (or are facing a problem persistently), then how dare you not build it (or address the problem). And if that's the case, there should be opportunity for someone else to see the problem and come solve it either with an alternate product, or a 3rd party solution.

> two types of social media strategies: open strategies, in which firms provided public responses to at least 75% of complaints, and closed strategies, in which at least 75% of the time, firms responded with just a single message directing the complainant to a private forum.

Consider a middle ground: direct the complainant to GitHub (or some other public off-Twitter channel). I wanna think this is the best strategy, but there's probably not enough companies doing this at scale to meaningfully compare.

Or just take the F - make your product better so that you've got less complaints drowning everything else out.

Imagine how much better the world would be if everyone ignored the losers on Twitter. Incalculable.

And if companies actually cared about their customers and provided prompt and effective customer service. Which includes giving the tools for them(support) to solve the issues...

"While Delta’s focus on providing customers with a seamless, transparent experience is admirable, our analysis suggests that this strategy could be dramatically increasing the public exposure of their negative customer interactions, and is thus likely having a significant negative impact on their stock price and brand image."

That is a pretty big claim to end this paragraph on. I would be interested in seeing exactly how their analysis connects twitter to stock price, if for no reason other than that it improves brand image for the sample set that is me.

I appreciate the candor and flying is a tough business, so of course there are going to be problems. What matters to me is how you handle those problems. Allowing these to be public lets me judge that behavior for myself.

If your response to someone publicly calling out your bad behaviour is to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent.

This article presents a distasteful world-view that "Good manners are a display of weakness" and the best strategy if you're a no-good company is "Sweep it under the rug where the neighbours can't see". How tediously reminiscent of quiet domestic abuse.

Here's another take; Most public responses to complainant's are insincere displays. Tepid litanies of excuses, virtue signalling, soft deflections, sugar coated restatements of unconscionable policy - these just show intransigent contempt for the complainant.

People aren't stupid. They see right through public "perception management". That's why the share price drops. These companies do it to themselves. When in a hole it's best to stop digging. Don't try turning complaints about a broken company into an "opportunity" to self stroke and posture. People are more sophisticated than company PR goons imagine.

Intuitively, I disagree with the article, but for some reason I'm having a hard time articulating my concerns.

You've definitely helped here (helped me) and my biggest problem is that analysis wasn't done on the type of replies. As you mentioned, the quality of the reply might be even more indicative of stock price fluctuations.

In general, without seeing additional numbers and some data to see if there is a trend in the sentiment of responses, I find it hard to adopt any hard and fast rule based on the article.

> If your response to someone publicly calling out your bad behaviour is to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent.

When people speak to individuals they speak differently than when they speak to a crowd. Callout culture is the manipulation of a direct conversation into a crowd conversation. In some ways that could work in a users favor but in other ways it could also work against them in that it makes the company drop any (if it existed) personal speech in favor of guarded corporate speak.

While I think that users engaging in callout culture is fairly toxic, I think that what it really highlights is our need for a better system for arbitration. With most tech products there is no system for arbitration and the human-based support systems are scarce. All that to say, I don't really think either party here is engaging in "good behavior", if we're going to be playing behavior police. It's also somewhat likely that some of these bad outcomes are egged on simply by reverting to callout culture.

The middleground I've seen to this is where companies provide a transcript or recording of interactions. That puts the user and the company on equal footing while reducing the chance of brigading and other bad behavior commonly used on Twitter.

You're right Kodah, "call-out culture" is toxic. Bad choice of words on my part. And yes, some people delight in turning a genuine error or manufacturing fault into a public flogging spectacle of a company that can do nothing right no matter how sincerely it tries.

What I think I object to is the calculating tone of the article, and the attempt to paint it as quantitative (and so implicitly rational) "research". Of course there are many interpretations of how brand value varies with visibility of arbitration, so I just proffered one (that maybe the PR people dig their own graves).

> The middleground I've seen to this is where companies provide a transcript or recording of interactions. That puts the user and the company on equal footing while reducing the chance of brigading and other bad behavior commonly used on Twitter.

Because of the power asymmetry I feel there is something sinister about a large company able to use "no-reply emails", stonewalling, or employ an entire legal team against an individual that makes it not okay to try taking a conversation initiated visibly to a place with less public legibility.

I'm not a Twitter user or reader, so quite naive as to how bad things get there. Reliable friends tell me "it's a sewer". I do understand that mobs can be nobs. I have had to firefight product mistakes with large numbers of unhappy users, and yes transparency is powerful. We published the Slack and ticket stream on website, and that cooled hot tempers and even had some of the users advocating for the devs in comments.

I do think you're right that at a certain size a company should be able to efficiently employ humans to solve human problems within a system. In practice, this turns out nightmarish. I think that's where governmental institutions can play a role in setting expectations for people interacting with large companies, especially ones that provide critical infrastructure (which admittedly, is a growing amount). We can't just declare them all public utilities, so in a way I think this sort of problem demonstrates a need for evolution in the way we govern people and corporations.

to try ushering them into an alley where nobody can see, that speaks volumes about your intent.

On the other hand, it can be hard to suss out details of an issue without exposing some sort of personal info, sometime unintentionally. I don't think it's fair to wholly categorize that as a negative. Plus, if you have a problem at a McDonald's, are you going to shout it out loud in front of everyone in the store (who has bad intent there?), or talk to individually to someone who can fix it?

It depends on the problem at hand, sure, but I also think people get that companies focus on just one avenue of support and funnel everyone there.

Can't access the study, but the article doesn't elaborate on how they're able to make the jump from correlation to causation ("companies that respond to 75% of complaints on twitter openly also tend to fall in brand quality metrics" -> "responding to complaints on twitter openly cause companies to fall in brand quality metrics"), and they also don't talk about the effect size.

To contribute a potential confounder, pasting this from another comment: "I've only ever engaged on Twitter when companies do not provide an avenue for direct customer support in private"

Are there any examples of successful companies out there with no Twitter presence? I've always wondered if the downsides of being exposed to the Twitter outrage machine as a brand are greater than whatever a company and their staff have to gain. Curious if anybody's ever attempted that experiment.

I always find it negative when company answers to complaints on any social media including Hacker News... That means their support process is entirely broken and basically they can't be trusted as partners.

If they answer complaints on Twitter, does it follow that they don't support people who call the help desk, fill out a web form, etc.? Your position makes sense if everyone who complains in social media only does so because traditional support channels have failed them, but I don't think that's the case. For many people complaining on social media is the default first step, and a company interested in good customer support should monitor those channels.

I believe in two strategies with those people ignore them or point them to correct customer support avenue.

Why would that follow? The marketing team is pushing memes on twitter and you think yelling at that person on the street is going to get your lightbulb replaced?

Unless they have a support twitter account your best bet is to go on the website and click content or help.

Customer support is treated as a cost center while PR is treated as something of great strategic value.

I wonder about having a BrandCS Twitter account. That way complainer's followers would see your brand being responsive, but your followers wouldn't see all the complaints.

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