Social Media – How (Not) To Handle Complaints

For a business, a customer is much more likely to spread news of a bad experience than they will a good one.

Social media provides the opportunity to spread bad news far further and faster.

This can be, for example:

• On their own Facebook wall for their friends to see
• By sending out tweets for their followers to see
• By putting a comment on a location-based service such as Foursquare, for anyone else visiting that establishment
• By putting a comment on your business’s Facebook wall (if you have one and you allow comments), for other customers to see

What should you do?

The first challenge is to identify when your business is being maligned. Comments on your own wall should be obvious, and there are various tools available to search the other social media tools.

If the complaint appears to be true, then you can respond to it in accordance with your usual customer service principles. Whether you then publicise your response, such as by a reply to the posting, is up to you. If the complaint is snowballing by involving other people, your response needs special care.

If the customer looks like they are trying it on, then your response would vary accordingly.

But what if the complaint appears to be untrue? Has it been posted by a competitor or a genuine customer?

What about the Law?

The laws of libel and slander apply equally to social media as to any other form of communication. Should you go to law?

That is a tricky question. They say “any publicity is good publicity”. Suing a competitor is likely to provide both you and them with publicity. But what if it is a customer?

The recent case of System Graph suing a customer for EUR200k in Greece highlights the dilemma. Apparently the customer had a legitimate complaint, and after the initial experience couldn’t trust System Graph to put it right, which they had offered to do. He made a posting on Twitter about the company, which the company considers defamatory.

The PR professionals appear to be in agreement that legal action is not advisable. Would you want your company’s reputation to be one of suing customers, whether the action proves successful or not?

Excel Add-ins for Management Reporting

Just a reminder that if you want to use Excel for dashboards or management reporting, there are three useful sets of add-ins:

1. Gauges
2. Sparklines (mini graphs)
3. Traffic Light Charts

Click each link for further details.

What's Driving Revenue, Costs and Cash Flow?

At the end of each period, you look at your business results and hopefully admire the revenue, the margin and the net profit. You may even look at the balance sheet, especially if your bankers are interested in key ratios.

But maybe there's a problem with a result, and you need to fix it. What’s driving these figures?

If you were running a multi-stage production process, such as a brewery, you’d have a control room that was monitoring each stage of the process. Each key statistic would be represented on a gauge or other form of display.

A business is like a multi-stage process - typically marketing to sales to operations to cash, depending on the business. What are the key statistics that you need to see? How often do you need them?

These statistics are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), or Key Performance Drivers (KPDs) to distinguish them from results such as revenue.

Designing a set of KPDs has to be done very carefully to ensure they drive behaviour which is actually consistent with corporate objectives. It is easy to implement KPDs which actually promote the wrong behaviour.

KPDs provide early warning of where business processes are off-track, and the insight to tackle any shortfall in results.

If you'd like to take advantage of KPDs, do contact me by email or by phone on 01628 632914.

Cloud Computing – Reducing Costs using VideoConferencing

The improvements in the internet are opening up a whole new set of applications that are remotely hosted within the cloud. In each case all you need to use them is a PC (or other suitable device), a reasonable internet connection, and typically a web browser.

Videoconferencing has proved increasingly popular for multi-site organisations, to reduce the need to travel and thereby cut costs, time and hassle. But videoconferencing has typically required use of a meeting room and an expensive teleconferencing system.

You are probably familiar with Skype as an internet-based system that allows simple videoconferencing from your PC desktop to one other person, announced to be extended to 5 or so. However video quality can be poor and unreliable.

There are now other offerings that offer business-class video meetings to the desktop, for a modest monthly fee. One system better optimised for the internet, delivers on a reliable basis up to HD quality. It is possible to have up to 100 participants at individual PCs, or in combination with a room system. Whoever is speaking takes centre stage on the screen. It is also possible for any speaker to display a presentation, document or other window from their desktop. Two screens allows the presentation on one screen, and the video links on the other.

This opens up a wide variety of possibilities, where holding a virtual meeting is far cheaper and easier than traveling. Video meetings can also significantly improve a meeting's effectiveness. For example:

Sales Teams
The sales director can now hold face-to-face meetings with some or all of their team, wherever they are located. This allows such meetings to be held more regularly than  would otherwise be possible.

Development Teams
Multiple members of the team can join a video call, even if working in remote locations, and can show prototypes or their other work to each other.

Group Board meetings
Directors can join in video Board meetings from their desk or home, almost wherever they are. If some of the members are able to meet physically in a videoconferencing room, then those that can’t can join in.

Recruitment
Initial interviews can take place with candidates by inviting them as a guest.

Telemedicine
Other 1to1 calls can still take place at high quality, such as doctors' discussions with patients, or any other professional with their clients.

Remote Training
One trainer can relate to up to 100 delegates at individual locations, where the person asking a question is clearly displayed. Alternatively, the course can be presented on a large screen in HD quality to a room.


If you’d like further details of these options, do contact me by email or ring me on +44(0)1628 632914.