Manage Complaints and Feedback With SMS

Complaints are one of your businesses most significant assets.

Bear with us.

When your customers complain, they’re sharing valuable knowledge with you about their unmet need. Learnings that, if acted on correctly, can grow your business by improving your customer experience.

Yes, sometimes, customer complaints aren’t valid.

But more often than not, the customer has a point.

The challenge for business owners is how to manage complaints and feedback from customers. You don’t want what happened to United to happen to you.

All of the negative buzz at the time of the video’s release even played a rolel in causing United’s stock to drop 10%, costing shareholders $180 million.

That’s why you need to manage complaints and feedback with SMS.

Provide a Text Complaint Hotline

No one likes to receive customer complaints. But just because you dislike hearing where your business came up short, doesn’t mean you should make it difficult for people to provide feedback.

Plus with text messages, you’re not called out on a public forum like Twitter or a review site like Yelp.

Let’s say you’re a restaurant with several locations. You can advertise a phone number where customers can text you their feedback.

Here’s an example of how this works in practice from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

All incoming texts come to your SimpleTexting inbox where you can filter by time waiting. For positive feedback, you can create a template text message that thanks them and shares a link to an online review site. (Here’s how to create a template.)

That way, you can quickly respond to all of the positive feedback and generate more good reviews. 

Despite your best efforts, you’ll also receive some negative comments.

Since a text message is much faster than an email or call, you can start making things right immediately.

There is an art to writing an excellent complaint acknowledgement SMS. A superb response does the following:

• Apologizes for any inconvenience caused
• Gives information on the action you’ll take to address the issue
• Thanks them for their feedback
• Clearly outlines what you’ll do to fix the situation

Depending on your business or the complaint, you might want to let the person know a phone call is best.

For example, if someone has a serious complaint about–for example–discrimination, it’s best to let the person know you’ll call them immediately at a time that’s convenient for them.

If you start to see a pattern in the feedback, then you’ll want to take action. For example, if you get some simple complaints such as food that isn’t hot enough, you should try to incorporate this feedback into your kitchen team’s process immediately.

The Start of Your SMS Customer Service Strategy

Keeping customer complaints off of public forums like social media is just one reason to implement a complaint and feedback SMS hotline.

It also gives you a more personal way to respond to negative feedback so that you can show you care.

If you’re interested in other ways SMS could compliment your customer service strategy, then we recommend checking out this article on how to get started with text-based customer service.