Insight 12 www.aftermarketonline.net MARCH 2025 The art of being social Bill Fennell, chief ombudsman and MD at The Motor Ombudsman, on how garages can maintain a positive reputation through effective management of consumer complaints and negative feedback on social media In the digital era, social media is a valuable marketing tool that can provide valuable free exposure to help drive customer footfall and business leads for garages. At the same time however, these powerful online platforms can also bring unwanted publicity and compromise reputation, as they have become one of the primary channels through which customers can express concerns and complaints about a product or service they have received. On this point, customers can be quicker to turn to the likes of X, Facebook, Instagram, or even LinkedIn, to express a grievance in such a public forum, than to give praise. For garages, social media therefore brings parallel lands of challenge and opportunity, i.e. managing potentially reputation-damaging negative feedback in this virtual arena, whilst at the same time, capitalising on the many benefits that it brings for business development, publicity and customer loyalty. Monitor user activity and comments With social media being a 24/7, 365-day-a-year real-time communications tool, a key action is to keep a close eye on user interactions with your pages and posts. This is especially relevant if your garage is highly active on these platforms, and uses social media as a key form of regular communication and as a ‘shop window’. In fact, frequent monitoring allows timely responses, to both celebrate customer endorsement following a positive experience, but conversely, it allows any negative concerns to be swiftly ‘nipped in the bud’ before they give rise to any unwanted escalation and amplification. For example, this may include users tagging their members of parliament, ‘consumer champions’ in the press, or consumer complaints programmes on TV or radio, into their posts, in an attempt to bring further attention and impact to their concern and/or negative exposure towards a business. Ultimately, how fast you respond can act as a gauge for consumers in terms of how reputable and customer-focused you are as an organisation, meaning time is often of the essence. Respond publicly, resolve privately Some consumers may choose to express their dissatisfaction publicly in the first instance to achieve greater visibility. This may be on your Facebook wall or through tagging your ‘@ handle’ on X so that the post is visible to others in their feed. In these instances, it is essential to publicly acknowledge their complaint or comment to show that you’re listening to them, but to then take the conversation offline to help ‘contain’ and diffuse the situation. This is particularly important because, with social media being a public facing platform, any conversations published, are visible to any other user via this interface, used by millions every day. Such a statement can be as brief as: “Dear X, thank you for bringing this to our attention. We are sorry to hear about your experience with us, and we will look to resolve this as quickly as possible.” A short and empathetic reply in direct response to the consumer’s concern can show that you value the individual and understand the reasons behind their frustration, and that your business is willing to spring into action to put things right with an appropriate remedy. By demonstrating an open approach and a willingness to engage, this also gives a chance to diffuse the situation through more informal channels, and help offset the chance for the dispute to turn into an official complaint, which may be more substantial in nature and
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