Lessons from British Airways: How to Prevent and Manage Negative Online Reviews

“Don’t fly with @BritishAirways. They can’t keep track of your lug­gage.” So read the tweet from Hasan Syed, frus­trated with how the air­line han­dled his father’s lost lug­gage. Syed was so upset that he spent $1,000 to pro­mote his com­plaints on Twit­ter. That form of paid adver­tis­ing put his tweets in front of an expanded audi­ence, which rapidly gen­er­ated a whirl­wind of neg­a­tive online pub­lic­ity for the air­line. And while British Air­ways ulti­mately found the lug­gage and apol­o­gized, the dam­age was done. The com­plaint had gone viral. For British Air, the only recourse was dam­age control.

It’s a new age of cus­tomer ser­vice in the age of social media, one where online reviews can help or hurt rev­enues. Here are some valu­able cus­tomer ser­vice lessons from the British Air­ways experience.

• Mon­i­tor your brand’s online rep­u­ta­tion. Set up Google or Yahoo! alerts to get notices on men­tions of your brand/business in blog posts, news arti­cles and videos. Explore free tools like Board­Reader, which mon­i­tors dis­cus­sion forums, or Social Men­tion. There are plenty of free online rep­u­ta­tion man­age­ment tools available.

• Take com­plaints seri­ously. Help your cus­tomer ser­vice staff under­stand every com­plaint is impor­tant. Let your cus­tomers know you appre­ci­ate their busi­ness through the amount of time and atten­tion you pro­vide to them. Fol­low the prin­ci­ples of cus­tomer care for a suc­cess­ful inter­ac­tion every time.

• Resolve prob­lems quickly. A cou­ple of hours can be a long time in the social media uni­verse. Think of how quickly posts can esca­late. It’s impor­tant to reach out to your dis­grun­tled cus­tomer as soon as pos­si­ble. Let cus­tomers know what to expect and when. Keep them informed every step of the way. Con­tact them even when there is no update to assure them you are work­ing on the problem.

• Offer up a value-added prod­uct or ser­vice. Give your cus­tomer a dis­count on future ser­vice, or another acknowl­edge­ment of appre­ci­a­tion, show­ing you value his/her busi­ness and encour­ag­ing them to return.

• Address the trend behind the com­plaint. If one cus­tomer is com­plain­ing about a bad expe­ri­ence, chances are it’s a trend. Deter­mine whether the com­plaint is a symp­tom of a larger prob­lem. Resolve that issue and you’ve just accom­plished the ulti­mate in cus­tomer ser­vice: pre­vent­ing issues before cus­tomers become upset. It takes a lot less time and money to pre­vent prob­lems than it does to han­dle them once a cus­tomer is ticked off.

• Pro­mote the pos­i­tive. Ask now-satisfied cus­tomers to post follow-up reports online in the same forum as the orig­i­nal com­plaint. Encour­age pos­i­tive reviews from all of your cus­tomers, includ­ing those who did not reg­is­ter com­plaints. Ask for cus­tomer feed­back at the point of sale and pro­vide a place online for them to share it. You can fur­ther encour­age reviews by enter­ing cus­tomers in a monthly give­away or pro­vid­ing other incentives.

Remem­ber that neg­a­tive online reviews hap­pen. By putting the cus­tomer first, and con­cen­trat­ing on cus­tomer ser­vice sat­is­fac­tion, you’ll be able to emerge with an impec­ca­ble online reputation.