Short Responses to Feedback

In today’s business world, your professional demeanor is not limited to your physical workplace. Your online presence is an extension of you and must also convey all of the characteristics we have discussed in the last section. Given the amount of cyberbullying and plain rudeness we all see online, it is even more challenging to maintain your professionalism when responding to an external critical message on social media.

Here are some tips for how to deal with negative comments about your organization on social media:^[1]

1. Respond as soon as possible
2. Apologize
3. Discuss the problem privately by taking the communication to another channel like email
4. Appreciate the feedback
5. Ask how you can help and follow through with helping

Using these guidelines, you can easily craft a short response like the following examples:

Thanks for your feedback! We’ll take a look at the issue and get back to you within a week.

We are so sorry for your negative experience with our product. We’ve sent this issue to our customer support team, and they should be reaching out to you within the next day to resolve the problem.

In addition to these guidelines, keeping things light and using humor can also be effective for a short message response.

Wendy’s on X

Wendy’s X feed has a bit of a reputation for being irreverent (just check out some of their posts). While this brand of humor has gained Wendy’s quite a bit of positive attention, some people argue that Wendy’s is making outdated jokes, Wendy’s responded with the following:

buy our cheeseburgers pic.twitter.com/tohfFsyeR4

— Wendy’s (@Wendys) June 28, 2018

Wendy’s largely agreed with the comments that their social media posts are a marketing strategy, but they were able to make a joke out of the interaction and maintain the tone they cultivated.

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