A Twitter Account Used Only for Complaints

An account that only hears complaints

Many businesses opened a Twitter account a few years ago, posted for a while and stopped. The account is still there, linked from the website footer and printed on old menus or a window decal.

Customers find it and use it the way many people now use Twitter with businesses: to complain, in public, from their phone, at the moment something goes wrong.

Nobody at the business sees those tweets. They sit unanswered, and anyone who searches for the business on Twitter finds a row of complaints with no replies.

Why customers complain on Twitter

• It is faster than finding a phone number or an email address.
• It is public, which they hope will get attention.
• Their followers see it, and some join in.
• Large companies answer there, so they expect every business to.
• It works on the spot, while they are still annoyed.

The fourth sets the standard you are judged by. Airlines, banks and phone companies have taught customers to expect a quick reply on Twitter, and a small business is measured against that whether it agreed to or not.

Where the complaints go

A tweet that mentions your account goes to that account's notifications. If nobody logs in, the only other signal is an email to the address on the account, usually the one used when it was created.

That address may belong to someone who has left, or to an inbox nobody opens.

Not every complaint uses your account name either. People write the business name, a nickname or a misspelling, and those tweets reach no notifications at all. Only a search finds them.

Mentions do not appear on your own profile, which is why an owner glancing at the account sees nothing wrong. They appear in searches and in the timelines of the complainer's followers.

Watch it, or say you do not

The first decision is whether anyone will look after the account. If nobody will, say so rather than leave it looking open.

Change the bio to say the account is not monitored, and give the phone number and email for help. Pin a tweet saying the same. Keep the account itself, since deleting it can free the name for someone else.

That is a reasonable choice for a business with few customers on Twitter. For most businesses that serve the public, watching it takes ten minutes a day.

Watching without living on Twitter

Turn on notifications for mentions in the Twitter app on the phone of whoever will answer, and send email notifications to a shared address rather than one person's.

Save a search for the business name and its common misspellings, and check it at set times, morning and mid-afternoon. TweetDeck, Twitter's own free dashboard, can show mentions and searches side by side.

Put the hours you answer in the bio. Customers accept a reply the next morning far more readily when the account told them to expect one.

Answer in public, briefly

The first reply goes where the complaint went: in public, and quickly. Acknowledge the problem, apologise where one is owed, and explain what you will do about it.

Keep it short and human. Sign it with a first name if more than one person answers, and never argue about the facts in front of the complainer's followers.

Do not ask for an order number, a phone number or anything personal in a public tweet.

Move the details somewhere private

Twitter has a setting that lets anyone send the account a direct message, even people it does not follow. Switch it on, then invite the customer to send their details there, or give them a number to call.

Refunds, receipts and addresses belong in that private conversation.

When it is settled, a short public reply closing the thread is worth sending. People who saw the complaint can then see how it ended.

A worked example

A coin laundromat near a university, with forty machines and a wash-and-fold counter, opened a Twitter account when it renovated three years ago. It tweeted a few specials and then went quiet.

Its notifications went to the email address of the contractor who had set the account up.

Students kept tweeting at it: a dryer that took their money, a card reader that was down all weekend, a wash-and-fold order returned without its socks.

One complaint about the card reader was retweeted by dozens of people, beneath a reply saying they never answer here.

The owner learned about it when a regular showed him the thread on her phone.

Notifications now go to the manager's phone, the bio gives the counter's hours and phone number, and every open complaint got a reply offering a refund by direct message.

A sign by the machines now invites customers to tweet the number of any machine that is out of order. The complaints have become repair requests, answered the same day.

What the complaints tell you

Read together, complaints are free information. The same machine, the same hour, the same missing item: patterns show up that no single tweet reveals.

Keep a simple log of each complaint and what fixed it. A problem that appears three times in a month is a repair or a change of process, not a customer service task.

The counter-case

A business whose customers are not on Twitter, such as many trades and firms that sell to other businesses, may see one complaint a year. A monthly search for the name is enough there.

And an account with nobody to answer it is better marked clearly as unmonitored than left looking open.

For any business whose customers tweet, though, watch the mentions daily, answer in public quickly and move the details to a private channel.

Before the next complaint

1. Search Twitter for your business name and misspellings.
2. Read every mention from the past year.
3. Reply to complaints still waiting for an answer.
4. Send notifications to a phone someone checks.
5. Allow direct messages from anyone.
6. Put your answering hours in the bio.
7. Check mentions twice each working day.

Step four is what stops this happening again. An account can be tidied in an afternoon, but unless notifications reach a person who answers, the complaints simply pile up once more.

Using each tweet's space for what customers need is covered in photos no longer count against Twitter's 140 characters.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.