How Malaysian brands respond to customer complaints on social media

Read the results of our journalistic experiment by Hando Sinisalu and learn how to use social media to boost the image of your brand.

Social media in not supposed to be one-way broadcasting. “Social” by essence means that the brands should have meaningful conversations with their followers.

The way how brands respond to the customer complaints is very important: especially the Millennials who form their opinion about the brands based on social media.

Dissatisfied customers often express their feelings through social media – it’s the easiest and the most natural form of communication.

Who wants to spend endless minutes listening to the music on hold? Social media is as important customer service touch-point as telephone or customer service clerk.

However, surprisingly many big, even global brands still treat social media as one-way broadcasting and ignore customer comments.

Big corporations need to show their human face in social media

In the case of utility company, Georgian Water and Power (GWP), they had serious image problems – customers were extremely angry because of the constant interruptions.

GWP made a brave decision to respond to every complaint with the video right from the epicenter of the works featuring real working people.

The result: overwhelming success in changing the image of GWP.

I think this case from Georgia is a perfect example of how brands should use social media to interact with dissatisfied customers.

Check out the case movie:

Unanswered complaints or irrelevant comments leave bad impression about the brand and need immediate attention – either response (if relevant) or should be deleted (if hateful or completely irrelevant)

Below are some examples of how different brands respond (or do not respond) to critical customer comments.

Example: General Electric Instagram page – somebody just promoting something completely irrelevant, GE does not react at all

Example: Oracle Instagram page – somebody praising the competitor (Microsoft). Comment left unanswered/reacted

Example: Vodafone UK responds only to complaints about customer service, but does not respond to hateful comments (and leaves such comments on their page)

Example: Hubspot responds to the negative comment about customer service

How is the situation in Malaysia? We ran a little experiment with several big Malaysian companies by posting a comment “Disappointed with your customer service” on their Instagram and Facebook pages.

Here’s what happened:

PETRONAS just deleted the comment and did not respond.

T.M Group did not respond.

Air Asia did not respond

Example: Maybank responded:

Example: Alliance Bank responded

Example: Maxis – responded

Disclaimer: I (Hando Sinisalu) do not have any complaints about the customer service of above mentioned companies, the comments were posted as a part of journalistic experiment.

When it comes to B2B Marketing, Marketing Magazine Malaysia will like to take this opportunity to announce that Hando Sinisalu, will be conducting a special B2B Conference on the 21st of August 2019.

There will be Award-winning B2B Marketing case study examples from all over the world! The case studies will be from the following sectors:

IT service providers, Software companies, Financial services, Manufacturing, Telecommunications & Business consultancy services