One of the golden rules of handling a social media crisis is to acknowledge that there has been a problem.
You don’t have to have all the answers, and in most cases you probably won’t at the start of the crisis, but an acknowledgement of the issue at least notifies your customers that you are aware.
Pretty simple stuff.
So it was baffling to see WHSmith seemingly ignore the rule this week when it found itself in the social media firing line when its customers began receiving emails containing the personal details of other customers owing to a ‘processing bug’.
The details included names, addresses and phone numbers. Information typed into the newsagent’s ‘contact us’ form on its magazine website, which was supposed to be passed on to the company itself, was instead sent to its mailing list.
In what became something of a vicious circle, some subscribers used the affected form to contact the retailer to alert them to the problem, but this simply generated more messages to users’ inboxes – one imaginative woman even used the ‘misconfigured’ form to appeal to fellow customers for a job.
Understandably angry customers, fed up at being inundated with emails and concerned about their personal data, took to social media to complain. But there was no word from the retailer on its Twitter or Facebook accounts until the problem was resolved.
We would not necessarily expect all the individual complaints to be responded to, but an acknowledgement of the issue at the earliest opportunity would surely be helpful to customers using these channels. Even its @WHSmithsupport account, which presumably exists to help customers, failed to make reference to the issue. It seems ‘radio silence’ was the chosen approach.
In fact, the first word from the retailer came in the form of a response to the mounting press enquiries. Of course you have to respond to media interest, but when the crisis has started on social media you should also be issuing information on those channels. Interestingly the press statement didn’t apologise to affected customers until the fifth sentence and even then it was made clear it was the company who manage WHSmith’s magazine subscriptions which was apologising. Apologising is a good move and customers are likely to forgive you if you say sorry and are sincere. Blaming another company, however, and suggesting that they have apologised is not likely to win much support.
It is not a pleasant experience to be in crisis media management mode, particularly when it includes a social media storm. But learning from the mistakes of others can make it easier and in this case they are straight forward lessons. Acknowledge the problem at the earliest possible opportunity, use the same channels as those who are talking about the issue and apologise.
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