Comic Con Manchester 2024 – An example of bad online customer service on Facebook and how it could be easily improved
Customer Service online is a tricky business, harder I would say than it is in person or indeed on the telephone.
Having worked in customer service, I understand the challenges, especially online for example when I worked at the Home Insurance Contact Centre at the Co-Operative between 2006 and 2007 knew from experience on the telephone how careful we had to be with people on the telephone.
When social media came forward some years later, it no longer became the case of you can tell your customer one bit of incorrect information, and it may well shoot out among their friends, as soon as it went onto social media, it could easily be carried forward if you had a good reach thousands and thousands of people within seconds.
Take, for example, Manchester’s Comic Con at Bowlers, Trafford Park yesterday, my wife Amanda and I went over to their 2024 event yesterday (See link below for a full review)
, we encountered a very badly handled complaint by their Customer Service on Facebook just after leaving the premises.
The picture above is perfectly correct, we arrived just after 11.30 am and were already busy but then got worse with no working air conditioning which resulted in a few doors getting opened down the venue which cooled things down a little, but only a little, and there were simply not enough seats for people to sit on.
The problem with this image is the way Comic Con Manchester responded to the complaint. Speaking as a person who has had to send out thousands of emails, messages etc on a professional level, at best it could be argued that this was a hastily worded response and, at worst completely unprofessional.
On some of the better-run pages by companies on Facebook, the customer service skills displayed can be too much the other way as I’ve seen some pages where queries or feedback are responded with long-winded messages which could be cut into half quite easily enough and kept professional.
In this case, the level of professionalism is bad enough to start in response but there are other comments when people were complaining that their comments were being hidden and made to feel like spambots.
Customers may not always be right, but when you start treating customers like this, you are leaving yourselves open to losing a lot of customers by the simple click of a button or a badly structured response.
In an age where a single tweet can make or break a brand, Comic Con's response is a stark reminder that even the biggest events can stumble when faced with disgruntled customers.
It's a lesson in how quickly a company's reputation can unravel if social media management isn't a top priority.