Last week I did a webinar with Lyle Fong, CEO and Co-Founder of Lithium Technologies and Ken Tuchman, Chairman and CEO of TeleTech. The event was focused on social business; specifically social CRM, social support and the intersection with business process outsourcing (BPO) providers like TeleTech. TeleTech and Lithium announced a strategic partnership earlier this week that will bring traditional CRM BPO services together with community-based social support, a unique and fresh opportunity for companies that are looking at ways to interact more effectively with the social customer. Having top talent to manage customer communities is a critical success factor for running successful SCRM initiatives. Anyway, as a part of the webinar we took some questions from the audience and unfortunately we ran out of time and didn't get to all of the queue. One unanswered question stuck in my head ever since and I want to spend some time with it. The question was how do you deal with negative interactions on a customer community (or something like that)?
Sometimes it seems like there are a disproportionate number of negative people online. I think that's partially because it's easier to spread negativity and tear down that it is to be positive and create things, it's just less effort. And on the other side, it's easier to believe the negative or believe the worst than the positive. There are lot's of reasons why a person might be negative, maybe they are lashing out against change, looking for attention, building themselves up at the expense of others, trying to gain the power over others that they don't have in their offline life, or just having a bad day...and negative people don't generally know they are being negative. In fact sometimes just pointing that out can change or diffuse the whole situation.
How to deal with negativity in a social web setting is something that I get asked fairly often and certainly a big concern for businesses that are building a social presence. While it's not overly complex, it is very important to develop response guidelines and policies, and to train involved employees in the proper responses. This is just another part of your crisis response plan, something that several companies / brands have learned the hard way. From a community perspective some negative comments / feedback are positive indicators and provide opportunity to discuss and respond to issues.
In general negative comments fall in three categories: 1. real issue or attack over a real issue, 2. constructive criticism, and 3. unwarranted attack, commonly referred to as trolling or spam. For each category there are a few ways to deal with the commenter. I like to use the classic crisis approach; reflect, respond (if warranted), and recover as the framework for preparing the plans. Reflect is the planning phase, and in planning identify the type of negative commenter (if possible) and remember to plan a response that is proportionate to the harm or potential for harm. It's useful to establish if the problem or complaint is legitimate or not. Responses should also stay positive, show respect and most importantly, don't surrender power over "you". For category 1 and 2 don't avoid, acknowledge the problem, let them know they have been heard. For real issues or attacks over real issues, once the problem is acknowledged, which let's the community know you have responded, try to take the conversation to another private channel (email, IM, DM, phone). After resolution you can go back on the public channel.
Sometimes people just want to complain in public but won't engage in private, so respond, offer, and leave it alone. For sustained attacks, especially unwarranted attacks, often other community members will step in, making your response unnecessary. It's much more powerful for community members to field comments, especially tough ones that reek of attack. Just like in any other social situation there can be bullies. The bully syndrome can be especially harmful in communities or blogs that allow anonymous participation (something that I don't think is a good practice). In response to unwarranted attacks it is often most effective to ignore the commenter, which takes away the fuel for their fire. More often than not deleting negative comments is not a good practice and will risk creating a larger backlash. I think there's an exception though for obviously abusive, obscene or socially unacceptable comments (which should be clearly stated in your terms of service on the community). Some other thoughts about responding, you can't fight fire with fire (or maybe you can't fight fire by pouring gasoline on it), build a fun community and quite often you can diffuse unpleasant interactions with humor, Also remember a simple rule, apologize if you screw up. How do you deal with negative people online?
Tags: social CRM, community, negative, comments, Lithium, TeleTech
