Last week, we talked about how British Airways learned an expensive lesson by not listening to their customers. In case you missed it, British Airways lost a customer’s luggage. The customer was unsatisfied with the response from British Airways and decided to buy a promoted tweet from Twitter to get their attention. 

Because British Airways was not listening on Twitter when the tweet went live, the tweet had time to go viral before they could respond.

How can we stop this from happening to our brands? There are three steps:

1. Respond Immediately. When a customer calls, emails, direct messages, tweets (or whatever) to you about a problem they have, your only option is to respond immediately. Let them know you heard them. If they do not feel heard, they have the power to make sure they are heard through countless options online.

2. Set Expectations. Now that you have responded to your customer, don’t leave them hanging. If it is going to take 24 hours to figure this out, set the expectation immediately. If your customer finds your proposed response time unacceptable, then promise them a call back in 12 hours. Make a commitment and stick to it.

All of us fill a communication gap with the most negative information possible. We can’t help it. We are subjected to negativity 24/7 through the media. Don’t leave your customers with a communication gap they will fill negatively. 

Set expectations and follow through. Keep your promises. 

If you set my expectations at 12 or 24 hours, I can move on with my life until the deadline arrives. If you do not set my expectations, I will be watching the phone wondering why you haven’t called getting angrier every second.

3. Always Be Listening. You must be monitoring your direct customer communication channels constantly, setting expectations for your customers and keeping your promises by meeting those expectations.

In addition to monitoring all your direct customer communication channels, you must be listening to what is being said online. Here are a few great, inexpensive ways to listen online.

Google Alerts: Google is constantly searching the web and indexing everything it finds so it can provide better search results to its users. Why not put all of Google’s search bots to work for you? 

You can by going to Google Alerts (just google it) and putting in keywords you would like to monitor. Put in all variations of your brand and any key leaders who are known by the public. 

You can tell Google how often you would like to be notified via email when it finds the keywords you identified online. Google alerts monitors the “open web” only. Therefore, you will need a social media monitoring tool as well.

HootSuite: In social media, you’ve got to know where your users are and monitor those platforms. It would be very expensive for a small business to monitor them all. In the United States, Facebook has the most users by far, followed by Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Thankfully, HootSuite will allow you to set up search streams to find mentions of your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress blogs, Instagram and YouTube.

User Review Sites: There are plenty of these out there now and most were focused on the hospitality industry, hotels in particular. Now, Google’s star-rating system has drug the rest of us into the fray. Inviting our customers (and even those who are not our customers) to post whatever they want about us online. If you are only being reviewed on Google, you can probably manage that without a separate tool, but don’t forget about Yelp. If you need a tool to consolidate the reviews into one spot, check out Reputology and ReviewInc to help you out.

There are plenty of other social media monitoring tools out there, but I encourage you to keep it simple. Monitoring social media and all forms of online communication will continue to be a growing part of every business. Get in there and get started listening and responding.

Your customers are talking, are you listening?

Curt Fowler is an organizational growth expert and president of Fowler & Company, a business advisory firm dedicated to helping leaders create and achieve a compelling vision for their organization. He has an MBA in strategy and entrepreneurship from the Kellogg School, is a CPA, and a pretty good guy as defined by his wife and four children.

Have a business growth topic you’d like me to cover? Send suggestions to cfowler@valuesdrivenresults.com.

LaShaunda Jordan is a reporter with The Valdosta Daily Times. She can be contacted at (229)244-3400 ext. 1257.