Intuition and common sense need to be used to govern your decisions online; for example, if a disgruntled user has a significant following then ignoring their complaint may only exacerbate the situation.

Let’s look at Maytag, a household goods manufacturer that ignored one of its customer’s repeated complaints about her new washing machine. The woman in question – Heather Armstrong – was a new mother and so keeping her child’s clothes clean was obviously an important issue.  Armstrong reported a fault to the manufacturer and stated, as she wrote on her blog  following a frustrating call to customer services:  ”Is there anyone I can talk to who might see what I’ve been through and understand?”

After the call, Armstrong hung up the phone, walked over to her computer and posted the following to her Twitter account; “So that you may not have to suffer like we have: DO NOT EVER BUY A MAYTAG. I repeat: OUR MAYTAG EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN A NIGHTMARE.”

If Armstrong had a handful of followers, then this would have been a small drop in the digital ocean. But at the time, Armstrong – as one of the leading ‘Mommy Bloggers’ in the US – had over 1.2 million followers, the majority of whom could be considered a core audience for Maytag. Eventually, Maytag’s sister brand Whirlpool sent a repair man round and the manager of the executive offices called her. But it was too late, the damage had been done.

Rival company BOSCH spotted an opportunity, stepping in to offer Armstrong a brand new machine for free. Armstrong asked BOSCH to donate the machine to a local shelter, which it did, and as a result the brand benefitted from positive exposure to her many followers.

As we can see from the case above, understanding your customer data is critical.  In this rapidly evolving consumer landscape, data must underpin the actions your business takes. Web and social media analytics software enable businesses to monitor every mention of a brand in real time, and analyse them, to find out what conversations are taking place about your brand, products and spokespeople. Furthermore, develop an understanding of your influential commentators and keep a close eye on how many followers they have, how they prefer to be contacted, and who they talk to.

The key is to empower your staff to act and respond to social or online comments as rapid response is vital when answering customers publicly. Large retailers like Best Buy are doing this on a huge scale. Hundreds of employees make up the brand’s ‘Twelpforce’, and run the company’s corporate Twitter account to answer customer queries instantly as a group. This is an intelligent strategy that adds validity to the age old view that ‘many hands make light work.’

To conclude, let’s remember an insightful comment from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who told the Harvard Business Review the question he’s most often asked is, “What’s going to change in the next five to 10 years?” He says that this is in fact the wrong question however, and that it’s more appropriate to say, “What’s not going to change in the next five to 10 years?”

The digital landscape is inevitably going to continue to transform, so ensure you develop strategies that are flexible enough to allow you to act and respond – fast.

Christian Howes is head of solutions engineering for web intelligence specialist Webtrends.

Tags: amazon, best buy, bosch, christian howes, heather armstrong, maytag, mommy blogger, webtrends, whirlpool