Abuse magnets: the people behind corporate Twitter accounts

It’s three o’clock on the final day of the Premier League season, and fans across the country are switching on their Sky Now TV boxes hoping to stream the title decider between Manchester City and West Ham.

“Hoping” being the operative word, because five minutes into the game, the action from the climax of the season is replaced by an error message: Sky’s servers have collapsed under the weight of demand (not for the first time) and people are angry. Positively apoplectic, in fact.

Twitter is abuzz with people complaining that they can’t watch the match they just handed over a tenner to see, and before long the mob is turning on Sky’s various Twitter accounts, spewing pure bile as fast as their thumbs can tap it into their smartphones.

The Sky Twitter team mounts a rearguard action, issuing a poorly punctuated apology and promising a service update as soon as possible.
“F*** the update, just fix it. Rinse millions from people for a s*** service,” responds one customer. “F*** off, reply to is on here and stop covering your tracks. C****,” replies another, who’s so irate he’s lapsed into illiteracy.

I have myriad examples of abusive, absurd, ridiculous and disgusting messages we’ve received from people on social media

“I’m not interested, I’ll watch your fascist broadcasts at the pub. And by the way I’m not the sort of person to let up when slighted like this,” responds another, who seems to equate a service failure with someone questioning his parentage.

They’re obviously a handpicked selection of some of the choicer responses – the majority of people are far more reasoned in their responses to Sky’s poor Twitter handlers – but it’s fairly typical of the kind of abuse social media teams have to wade through when a service goes down, the trains stop running, or, erm, Ed Miliband talks about a recent visit to a hospital in Watford.

“I have myriad examples of abusive, absurd, ridiculous and disgusting messages we’ve received from people on social media,” said Anna Wilson, head of social media for Tangerine PR and The Juice Academy, which handles social media for clients ranging from the Wilkinson chain of stores to the boxer Amir Khan. “But the fact remains, no matter what it is, it can always be managed.”

We’ve interviewed the hardy souls behind some of the biggest corporate accounts on Twitter to find out what it’s like dealing with that level of abuse on a daily basis, how they’re trained to cope with it, and what life’s really like behind the social media accounts of the household names.

Change of purpose

It’s easy to forget that Facebook and Twitter were never intended to be vehicles for customer service. The 140-character limit and potential for anyone to effortlessly contact a brand and demand an instant response make Twitter a particularly tough way to manage difficult customers. The moment businesses decided to start using social networks as cheap ways to reach a mass audience, they laid themselves open to attack.

“A celebrity was tweeting about his experience and somebody [running BT’s Twitter account] offered help,” she said. “The moment somebody from a big company offered help it opened up a can of worms. All of the company’s customers started voicing their dissatisfaction. So BT, almost within that week, had to set up its strategy and set up its channels as a reactive measure.”

Salins said that when she first arrived at BT in 2010, the Twitter account was being operated by a handful of call-centre staff, but it soon became apparent that they were out of their depth when it came to being the face of the company to tens of thousands of customers, instead of a single customer at the other end of a phone line.

“The staff were under pressure to deal with a public conversation,” says Salins. “We had to operationalise it. We had to think about how we scaled those conversations, because the second BT was on social media, the greater the volume of people there was taking to those channels. We had to retrain our staff and build an operation that supported all sorts of scenarios.”

Salins said the BT Twitter team had to learn on the job. “In the early days it was tough. There wasn’t a lot of inspiration to draw from. Because we were one of the first brands to be integrated into the business that way, we were experiencing it on the fly.”

Salins made sure the team learned from its experiences and mistakes, however, modelling different customer-service scenarios, using “test shoppers” – people pretending to be genuine customers – and building up best practice.

Now, most big brands either have fully trained in-house teams or third-party agencies handling their social media accounts, which are often manned at all hours.

“A retail store opening nine to five, Monday to Friday, would typically require actively monitored social feeds during this timeframe to manage customer feedback and proactively engage on behalf of the brand,” says Tangerine PR’s Anna Wilson. “Whereas a chain of restaurants would require monitoring during the evenings and weekends – times when footfall is at its greatest. The number of people required to facilitate this varies, but typically it’s a minimum of three people and a maximum of five or six.”

Some brands are ridiculously meticulous about what appears on their feeds. A single tweet from a French cheese brand took 45 days from conception to being published, first passing through copywriters, designers and several internal review procedures, according to a report on Business Insider. It failed to garner a single retweet, and only two favourites.

Picking the right people

No matter how well trained or responsive a company’s Twitter team is, there will be times when they face a barrage of abuse – sometimes sexist and racist abuse, or threats of physical violence – for matters that are outside of their control. Simply monitor the @ replies of your local train operator the next time there’s a problem on the line to witness some of the vile invective the staff have to deal with.

The impersonal nature of Twitter leads some people to forget they’re dealing with another human being. “People in an online environment can lose all inhibition, because they don’t have a one-to-one contact,” says Salins.

Bian Salins is a managing consultant on social media at Capgemini, and has previously run the social media teams for major brands such as Sky and BT. She recalls how BT inadvertently turned Twitter into a customer-service platform back in 2008.

“When you’re on a phone call, people shout, but they’re aware they’re shouting. When people shout in a virtual space, they don’t care. The abuse can be pretty strong, almost to the point of bullying.” Salins says her staff have been racially abused because the customer wrongly assumed the Twitter account was being handled by a foreign call centre rather than staff in the UK.

“Thick-skinned” is a phrase that crops up regularly when you ask the social media experts what characteristics they look for in staff. “Who you choose to be on your frontline is really important,” says Salins. “The people need to be of a certain type. We were always very open with our staff to tell them this is what they’re getting into. Not everybody chose to be part of it, not everybody lasted.”

Mark Wainwright is a senior account director at We Are Social, an agency that includes sports brands such as Adidas and football clubs among its clients. He says the tribal nature of sports fandom can ratchet up the abuse another notch. “Even on a small scale, when people are saying nasty things about something you’ve been involved in, it’s not very nice,” he says.

Wainwright says Twitter isn’t the best place to deal with abusive customers, because the conversation is open for anyone to see. “Most brands will try to take the conversation offline, out of the public sphere, as quickly as possible,” he says.

When services fail, and there are thousands of customers ranting at the company’s Twitter account, the temperament of the Twitter account handlers is really tested. “A good social media agency will make sure you have robust plans in place in case something does go wrong,” says Wainwright. “You have to switch off, and in a crisis situation you just have to be quite thick-skinned and rely on your process.”

Not flannelling customers and being as honest as you can is critical, according to Salins. “We realised that when the floodgates open, acknowledging and accepting there’s an issue, and then reacting quickly, is very important in turning a negative into a positive.”

During a broadband outage at BT, she persuaded the company to let her tweet a photo of a flooded telephone exchange to customers, to help them understand why it was taking time to reconnect them. “If a brand isn’t willing to take that level of honesty and transparency, then it becomes extremely difficult, because all you’re going to be doing is telling your frontline staff to say sorry, and sorry isn’t good enough for thousands of people who are unhappy.”

Biting back

Yet, even with training and emergency procedures put in place, staff are only human and liable to snap on occasion. There are only so many times you can be called something unspeakable in the course of a ten-hour Sunday shift before something gives.

“When your emotions run high, that’s the point when you’re most likely to lose control,” says Wainwright. “Social media amplifies what could potentially be quite a small situation, because if you’re a huge brand then one tweet could be seen by millions of people. Even if you delete your tweet, someone is going to have screengrabbed it and sent it to the media. You might think it was only up for a second. The next thing you know you’re a major news story.”

Salins describes social media staff lashing back at customers as “the worst-case scenario” because it’s “brand-impacting”. Suddenly the company is trending on Twitter for the wrong reasons, and everyone from the head of PR to the CEO is dragged into the incident.

Wainwright says the only way to deal with it is with a swift mea culpa. “The best thing to do is acknowledge it, apologise, show that you’ve dealt with the situation and try to make sure that it won’t happen again. There’s nothing else you can do.”

He says that the fact these high-profile Twitter slip-ups have become reasonably commonplace has helped reduce the impact of a staff member going rogue. “People will be offended by it, but… [other] people will just find it funny. You have to do something particularly bad to make the papers nowadays.”

Such is the lot of the average social media account worker: paid something short of a king’s ransom to work antisocial hours and soak up regular abuse from customers, knowing that the one time your patience runs dry you’re likely to be the story on p7 of tomorrow’s tabloids. It may be worth remembering that the next time you’re preparing to vent your frustration at the cancelled 7.32 train from Didcot Parkway.