CP Communications director Catriona Pollard guest comment

Maintaining great customer service or experiences on Twitter is becoming increasingly important for businesses in the MICE industry. It can help to build a good reputation and also improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

If you receive a negative comment on your Twitter account, it’s important to respond appropriately to help prevent the problem escalating.

The worst thing you can do is to ignore a negative tweet or respond in a negative way. This could escalate the issue and lead to a major crisis situation if other Twitter followers join the conversation.

For example, a customer could complain on Twitter about how they disliked the venue or food at a particular event. If you don’t resolve the issue quickly they may continue complaining and get other people to support them. For high profile brands or events this may become a huge PR crisis and even be reported in mainstream media. If not handled in an appropriate manner this could damage the reputation of your business and you may lose customers, sales or future event attendees.

Here are some tips to help you respond to a negative tweet:

1. Tweet a polite public reply in response to the negative tweet and offer a clear process to resolving the issue.

2. If you are following the person who wrote the negative tweet then you can send them a polite direct message explaining in further detail how to resolve the issue or asking them to explain the issue further.

3. If you’re not following the person then send them a public reply and start following them. Ask them to follow you back so you can then send them a direct message.

4. Deal with the issue on a more personal level by asking for their contact details. This will be easier to resolve the issue when you can write more than 140 characters.

5. Remember to address the problem quickly.

6. Always stay calm and do not aggravate the situation further by getting angry or responding negatively. You can also research the person’s profile who wrote the tweet to understand their personality. This will help you to communicate better with them and help to meet their needs.

7. Always be on the lookout for tweets about your business, brand or event. You can use Google alerts, Twitter hashtag searches or http://tweetbeep.com  to find mentions of your business. You can also use http://monitter.com  to see a live feed of tweets related to or about your business.

It is important to maintain good customer service while using twitter, which means responding to complaints quickly, being helpful, treating customers or clients with respect and always being friendly and polite.