Imagine this: One of your customers in Asia posts a customer complaint about your company on Twitter. It’s in another language, so you don’t notice it.

But your competitor notices it—then offers that person a more appealing solution.

Or worse, the post goes viral, with people volleying the unflattering review back and forth from Mexico to Malaysia. Suddenly the collective perception of your business is being redefined, and not by you. With the ever-growing behemoth that is social media, all of this can happen as fast as it takes for sweat beads to start forming on your stricken CEO’s forehead.

Trolling your social media channels on a global scale is a powerful way for you to take the pulse of your customers’ experiences. Not doing so puts your brand’s reputation at risk.

The fact is, about 70 percent of customers who stop doing business with a company make the decision due to a poor customer service experience they have—rather than because of the product or service itself, according to researcher and author Tom Peters.

So it begs the question: Are you listening to what your customers are saying?

Choosing to take a proactive global approach to quality assurance and customer service support via your social media channels can mean the difference between gaining goodwill—and losing customers.

Going social with customer complaints: By the numbers

First, some revealing numbers. A recent consumer report showed the following:

• 89 percent of consumers chose to do business with a competitor in the wake of a poor customer experience.
• 50 percent of consumers allow a week for a company to respond to their complaint before writing them off.

And the kicker? A whopping four out of five consumer complaints voiced on social media go ignored by companies. This is a mistake, because stony silence can be even more frustrating—and damaging to your brand—than the possibility of telling your customer that you can’t address the issue. But at least you have acknowledged their complaint.

Case in point: An unnamed airline’s social media posts were recently culled and arranged into a word cloud that illustrated their customers’ experiences. The most frequently used terms were not flattering: “worst,” “fail” and “delays.”

Direct the conversation, build trust

As proponents of quality assurance in all its forms and modalities, we here at Sajan feel compelled to call out the fact that you can actually leverage the power of social media to raise the bar of client service and quality on a global scale.

Every complaint, concern, question and even compliment deserves a timely response to show that you’ve received the message and that you care about your customer and have his or her best interests in mind. This helps you mitigate risk while showing your customers that they can trust you.

Of course, your customers aren’t residing only in the United States. The localized materials you produce in their language are intended expressly for each of your target markets—so why not tune in to their impressions of you on the social channels they frequent most?

Start by taking a hands-on approach that stresses the act of listening to what your clients and partners are saying about you on your social media channels—the use of which is exploding all the time across the globe. Do you have many customers in Brazil, India and Mexico? Conduct research to find out which social networks they’re using to talk about you.

Machine translation: A triage system for social media monitoring

The tenor of discussion around your company could be drastically different in China compared to Mexico. And of course, the real time nature of social media has created an expectation among users of receiving fairly fast responses.

To help you meet this expectation, a language service provider like Sajan can provide machine translation services that help you get the “gist” of what people are saying on the social networks that your customers are frequenting.

Not every tweet or post needs to be translated, though. It may be helpful for you to work with your project management team on developing a triage system in which you comb through all messages for big red flags—such as a complaint or negative comment—and make sure those receive attention first. At that point, you can elect to include post-editing with machine translation, and issue your official response in near real time using the same process.

Dedicating resources to field quality concerns

Remember, your customers call the shots.

Show them that their opinions and experiences with your products, services and customer service teams matter greatly to you. One way to do this, which has been gaining traction among multinational companies, is to dedicate a Twitter feed to handling customer support interactions.

Dell maintains a staff of thousands who monitor customer questions and issues on their worldwide social networks. They resolve 2,000 issues per week via social media. Their social media command center alone houses 12 individuals who monitor global social media data in real time—spanning 11 languages.

If this seems overwhelming, take comfort in the fact that you don’t have to handle it alone. When you partner with Sajan, we can help you set up a system to monitor the global social media conversations about you all around the globe—to the level and extent that works best for you.

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Do you monitor for quality issues on social media? Is it feasible for your business to participate in this on a global scale? We welcome your thoughts.