Your customers will tell the world about a problem before they tell you, so social media early warning belongs on the support dashboard, not just in the marketing team’s inbox. The Domino’s video of the past two weeks is the clearest proof I’ve seen. The signal was public within hours. The response took days, and the gap between the two is the part every support leader should study.
Here’s what happened, as far as the coverage goes. Late on Monday, April 13, a video appeared on YouTube showing two employees at a franchised Domino’s in Conover, North Carolina, doing disgusting things to food they claimed would go out to customers. Readers of the Consumerist blog worked out which store it was. According to Nation’s Restaurant News, by Wednesday hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions, had seen it. When the company decided to respond, the video was closing in on 350,000 views.
Domino’s did respond, and in a way I’d copy. The USA president, Patrick Doyle, recorded his own video, said the Conover store had been shut down and sanitized, and gave the company’s Twitter followers the details to pass on. A company spokesman told the trade press it was all done very quickly. I believe that. I also think “quickly” was measured from the moment the right people found out, and the customers had a head start.
Why is social media an early warning signal for support?
Because it’s where customers talk before they call. In December I wrote about leading indicators for support teams, using Google Flu Trends as the example: people search for symptoms before they see a doctor, so counting searches gets you a week or two ahead of the official numbers. Public posts about your product work the same way. Somebody hits a problem, tells their friends, and only later, if ever, opens a ticket. If your first sign of trouble is the ticket queue, you’re reading the lagging number.
The Domino’s case is extreme, I’ll grant. Most of us won’t face a gross-out video with a criminal investigation attached. But the shape is common. A billing change confuses people and the complaints show up on a forum first. A release breaks something for a handful of power users and they post about it on Twitter that evening. A store or a region gives bad service for a week and the local blogs notice before head office does.
I thought for a long time that this was marketing’s job. It isn’t, or at least not only theirs. Marketing watches the brand. Support watches the customer’s actual problem, and support is the team that can confirm whether the problem is real, how many people it affects, and what the fix is. The person reading the posts needs a straight line to the person who can check the tickets, and in a lot of companies that line runs through three departments and a weekly meeting.
There’s a cost side too. A post you catch on day one is a conversation. The same post on day three is a story, and stories get repeated by people who never had the problem. The Domino’s numbers show how fast that tips: one video, two employees, and a brand-perception measure that moved within days. Early warning doesn’t make the problem smaller. It makes your share of the conversation bigger.
What should a support team actually watch?
Not everything, or you’ll drown. Start with three searches and run them every morning: your company name, your product name, and your product name with a word like “broken”, “down” or “refund”. Twitter’s own search does the job for free, and so do the blog search engines. You aren’t counting sentiment. You’re looking for a change in volume or a new topic, the same way you’d scan a queue for a cluster of tickets on the same issue.
Then write down what normal looks like. If your product name usually turns up five or six times a day and today it turned up forty, that’s your leading indicator moving. It might be good news. A popular blogger might have recommended you. It might be a complaint that’s caught fire. Either way, somebody should read the posts within the hour, and that somebody should know what to do next.
One measure from the Domino’s coverage is worth borrowing. Nation’s Restaurant News quoted a YouGov BrandIndex “buzz” score that fell from 22.5 to 13.6 and then partly recovered to 15.3. I can’t tell you how that score is built, and I wouldn’t hang a support team’s targets on it. But the idea of tracking a before, a during and an after is the right one. If you can’t say what normal looked like before an incident, you can’t say whether your response worked.
Keep the watching cheap. Fifteen minutes a day from one named person beats a tool nobody opens. Show me a team that bought monitoring software and never wrote down who reads it, and I’ll show you a company that found out about its own crisis from a reporter.
Who decides, and how fast?
Decide that before you need it. Most support teams have an escalation path for outages. Far fewer have one for a public complaint that’s spreading. They should. The thinking is the same as in escalation triggers for the first twenty minutes: write the trigger down while everyone’s calm, name the person who gets called, and agree what they’re allowed to do without a meeting.
For a social media signal, I’d write three levels. A single unhappy post gets a reply from support, the same day, offering to fix the problem in private. A cluster of posts on the same issue gets the support manager, who checks the tickets for a matching pattern and tells the product or operations owner. A post that’s spreading beyond your own customers, picked up by blogs or news sites, goes to the executive who can speak for the company, and it goes there that hour, not at the next staff meeting.
Domino’s eventually did the third level well. Their president spoke for the company, on the same platform where the problem started, in plain language. What I’d want to know, if I ran their customer service, is how long it took the first post to reach him. That number is the one you can actually improve. The response itself is mostly judgement. The time to get the right person in front of the problem is process, and process is fixable.
Give the frontline some authority, too. The person who spots the post at 8am should be allowed to reply without three approvals. A wrong-but-honest reply can be corrected. Silence for two days gets read as “they don’t care”, and nothing you say on day three fixes that impression.
What should the first public reply say?
Say what you know, what you’ve done, and when you’ll say more. That’s it. Doyle’s video did the first two well: the store is shut, it’s been cleaned, the people involved are gone. A company statement quoted in the trade press put it bluntly, saying Domino’s didn’t do this, it was done to them. I’d be careful with that line in most situations. It works when you genuinely are the victim. It backfires when the customer thinks you caused the problem, because it sounds like blame.
The best recent example of the third part, “when you’ll say more”, came from Google after the Gmail outage in February. I wrote about what Google got right in that apology: they said what broke, apologised without hedging, and explained what would change. Customers forgive a problem much more easily than they forgive not being told.
Answer in the place the complaint lives. Domino’s put their response on YouTube because that’s where the video was. A reply buried on your corporate press page doesn’t reach the people who saw the post. If the problem is on Twitter, reply on Twitter, then take the details to email or the phone. If it’s on a forum, post in the thread.
And don’t let the reply be the end of it. Go back to the customers who were affected and fix their problem one by one, the same way you’d handle any irate customer: listen first, own it, then fix it. The public reply stops the story spreading. The private follow-up is what keeps the customer.
The video was public on Monday night and the president’s reply came days later. The next one won’t give you that long. Is anybody on your team reading what your customers say about you in public, and would they know who to call?
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
