When we come right down to it, no business will ever satisfy everyone. Eventually someone, somewhere, will have a bad day and take it out on your business. Yelp has always allowed you to handle certain responses and communications with your customers in a public or a private manner; however Facebook has always required you to reply to customers in the same manner they contacted you – which means public posts required public answers.
As of today Facebook has allowed business owners and page managers to respond to posts via a private chat rather than making everything public. When you reply to a post privately everyone else simply see’s a notice stating that the business owner responded privately. This ensures that everyone knows you addressed the concern; the unhappy customer get’s a response; and certain false ramblings and accusations remain in private view.
Until now, Page admins could only respond to customers in the same way that the person reached out to the Page, either through a comment or private message. In the coming weeks, Page admins will be able to reply to public comments with a private message, helping them solve private customer requests more efficiently.
The new functionality, named Pages Messaging, goes hand-in-hand with Facebook’s responsiveness badge that I previously covered which rewards businesses who are quick to reply to customer messages. Facebook went a step further with the release of Pages Messaging by also launching a set of tools allowing business owners to respond faster.
To help Page admins respond faster to incoming messages, they can now create and save responses to common questions. Page admins can pull up saved replies and send them in one tap, making it faster and easier to respond to customers from mobile devices.