A Bad Week in Public

Why volume changes the response

A single complaint is a conversation with a person, and answering it well is straightforward.

Forty comments in two days is not forty conversations. Most of the people commenting are not customers, have no direct experience of you, and are responding to each other.

Replying to each individually, which is the instinct built from handling single complaints, extends the thread, keeps it visible, and produces forty more replies.

So the approach that serves you well ordinarily is the one that makes this worse, which is why it needs thinking about separately.

Establish what is actually true

Before responding at all, and it takes longer than the pressure suggests you have.

Find out what happened: whether the original complaint is accurate, whether it was one incident or a pattern, and whether anything about it is disputed.

Speak to whoever was involved, and ask them for the sequence rather than for an explanation.

An hour spent on that is worth more than a fast response, because a statement that turns out to be wrong is considerably worse than a slow one.

Where you genuinely do not yet know, saying so publicly is a legitimate holding position: we are looking into this and will say more today.

Respond once, properly

• One statement, posted on your own page.
• What happened, as far as you know it.
• What you are doing about it.
• An apology where one is owed.
• No blame, and no explanation of intentions.

Post it once, in one place, and link to it if you need to reference it elsewhere. A statement repeated in twenty comment threads reads as defensiveness rather than as consistency.

Then stop replying

The discipline, and it is the hardest part.

After the statement, reply only to genuine questions from people who appear to be customers, and to anything factually wrong that would mislead somebody.

Do not reply to opinions, to people restating the complaint, or to anybody looking for an argument.

Every reply is fuel: it pushes the thread up, signals that pressure produces a response, and gives the platform a reason to show it to more people.

Silence after a proper statement is not evasion. It is the statement standing on its own, which is what you want.

Nominate one person to watch the comments so that nobody else replies impulsively, which is the mechanism that produces the reply everybody regrets.

Tell your customers directly

The step that matters most and is frequently skipped.

Your actual customers are not following the thread, and they will hear a distorted version from somebody else if you do not tell them.

A short message to your list, or a call to anybody significantly affected, does more for the business than anything on the public page.

Say what happened, what you are doing, and that you are available to talk about it.

People who have paid you money are the audience that matters, and they respond well to being told directly rather than discovering it.

A worked example

A business had a complaint circulate in a local group, which drew a run of critical comments over about three days.

They posted one statement acknowledging the specific failure, saying what they had changed, and apologising, and then stopped replying entirely.

They also sent a short message to their customer list saying the same thing.

Comments continued for another day and stopped.

Two customers replied to the email to say they had seen it and were unconcerned, and one referred somebody the following month.

Their view afterwards was that the email to customers had done nearly all of the useful work, and the public statement had mainly been necessary to have made.

Fix the thing if there is a thing

Because the response is not the remedy.

Where the criticism is fair, the substantive change matters more than the statement, and saying what you have changed is only credible if you have changed it.

Do it quickly and say specifically what it was, rather than promising to review procedures, which reads as nothing.

Where the criticism is not fair, say so once, plainly and without heat, and accept that some people will not believe you.

Attempting to win that argument publicly is the thing that turns three days into three weeks.

Expect it to pass

The perspective that is impossible to hold at the time and is nearly always right.

These things run for days rather than weeks, and the attention moves on because it always does.

The people commenting most loudly are rarely customers and will not remember in a fortnight.

What persists is anything permanent: reviews, a news item, or a post that continues to be found. Those are worth attention afterwards, and the comment thread is not.

Do not make decisions about the business during the week itself, since decisions made under that pressure are usually overcorrections.

Keep a record while it happens

Unglamorous and occasionally important.

Screenshot the original complaint, anything defamatory, and your own statement with its timestamp, and note what you did and when.

Comments get edited and deleted, and a record made at the time is the only version that survives.

That matters if anything later becomes a legal matter, an insurance question, or a dispute about what was said.

It also gives you something factual to review afterwards, when memories of a difficult week are unreliable and the useful lessons are in the sequence rather than the feeling.

The counter-case

Some situations need more than this.

Anything involving safety, a legal matter, an injury, or a regulator is not a communications problem and should not be handled as one. Take advice before saying anything.

Sustained criticism that is genuinely deserved also does not end because you posted a statement, and treating it as a communications exercise rather than a business problem is the failure that makes it recur.

And a very small number of these are coordinated rather than organic, which needs a different response including reporting it.

Establish what is true, say it once, fix what is broken, tell your customers, and stop replying.

What to do

1. Find out what actually happened first.
2. Post a holding line if you need hours.
3. Make one statement, in one place.
4. Stop replying except to genuine questions.
5. Nominate one person to watch comments.
6. Tell your customers directly.
7. Fix the thing, and say specifically what.

Step six is the one that protects the business, since the people who have paid you money are the audience that matters and they are not reading the thread.

Handling a single one is covered in a complaint that arrives by email first.

Frequently asked questions

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