Valentine's Twitter Hell For Florist That Failed To Deliver
The online florist FTD Flowers was repeatedly sent messages on Twitter from customers wanting to know why their flowers hadn’t arrived.
See an image of FTD's disastrous Twitter stream below.
They remained professional throughout the exchanges despite a number of angry messages.
Twitter: FTD Flowers - @hecsfresco317 Sorry to hear, Hector! Could you please Follow and DM us your order number and contact info?
Although the complaints were coming in thick and fast, they are likely to represent only a very small proportion of the orders dealt with by a large company like FTD Flowers, especially on such a busy day.
Dedicated social media teams are now a must for any company wanting to engage directly with customers on sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
They have a great role to play in managing a company’s reputation and how they deal with complaints is crucial.
Last year O2 earned widespread praise for how they dealt with a stream of abuse from customers unhappy at the service they had received following a 24-hour failure of the company’s mobile network.
When one angry customer suggested that the O2 might abuse his own mother, the response came immediately: “Maybe later, got tweets to send right now.”
The company’s lightness of touch in dealing with the abuse turned a difficult situation into one where people found themselves siding with the company, despite the outage.
When the tweets turned to praising the telecoms company's strategy, its team maintained a humble and believable persona: responses ranged from “I need a hug” to pointing out how difficult it was to send tweets from the top of a mobile phone mast.
Following the episode, an O2 spokesperson said that the team hadn't had any particular instructions on how to respond to people. "Clearly we're not happy that we've disappointed our customers over the last 24 hours, but it's good to hear that some have enjoyed our tweets," they said.