Have you ever had a complaint come to your business? All of us can answer that in the positive, I’m sure. Those complaints used to come to a company via a phone call or an irate in-person visit. You might have even gotten a letter that details what went wrong. But since the advent of the internet, there’s a whole additional way for people to lodge their frustrations: social media. The question is, are you factoring how well you respond to social media into your measurement of customer satisfaction in general? If not, you’re missing a whole crucial angle.

Take this statistic for example: About one-third of all social media complaints don’t get dealt with. That means people are sharing something that went wrong with the product or service they paid good money for, and no one is paying attention. Even worse, they’re doing so and putting it out there for the internet — basically anyone with a connection — to review and use it to inform a purchasing decision.

So let’s take the flip side of that. What happens when you take the time to respond to a complaint on social media. Does it do any good? Turns out, yes. If you can fix those complaints that someone lodged on a website, you’re likely to increase the goodwill they feel toward you and your company by about 25 per cent. And that is an increase that makes figuring out a policy of customer service that includes social media well worth it.

 Part of any customer satisfaction metric is how quickly you were able to respond to complaints. But if you’re only looking at the time period for traditional asks, such as those on the phone or via in-person contact, then you’re missing a whole section. Social media has to be part of the equation.

What else can you do to create a customer satisfaction plan? This graphic explains it.

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