The good, the bad, and the ugly

Let's face it people, social media is a wonderful tool for communication.  Unfortunately, it's also an open forum for voicing your dislikes and poor experiences.  Good business practice tells us that you should never delete a comment from your Facebook page just because you don't like the negative feedback.  Obviously there are exceptions to every rule--for instance if someone is being obscene or trolling your page, but for the most part you just have to roll with the punches and handle the situation to the best of your ability.

Windstream Communications phone services went down today -- are currently still down, actually.  This outage is affecting THOUSANDS of businesses and apparently is not the first time this has happened.  After a client my husband works with contacted him regarding the outage, we began searching for answers, but seeing as how even Windstream itself doesn't have phone access, finding out what was going on was a little difficult.  That's when I decided to check their Facebook page.  There was one simple status update that  read "Currently, there is an outage with long distance which we are working on resolving as soon as possible.  No ETR at the time.  Updates will be provided as they are available." Comments were pouring in about the location of the outages and how they were not simply long distance outages, but phone services all together.  Needless to say, people were not happy.  What I found a little fishy is that as I was scrolling through the comments, the count suddenly went from 83 comments to 7 comments.  No, no, no, Windstream.  Please tell me you are not deleting these comments from your loyal customers?  Comments that are simply asking for answers and updates, none of which were obscene, profane, or troll-like, mind you.

Now I realize that Windstream is probably under a lot of stress at this immediate moment.  The phone lines of a phone company going down is like KFC running out of chicken, but as someone who stood behind the counters at KFC at the tender age of fifeteen, I can tell you that even KFC does indeed run out of chicken from time to time.  The appropriate response, however, is not to ignore your customers and hope they go away, but to politely say "I'm sorry sir (or madam), but the chicken is in the fryer and we will serve you as soon as possible.  Here's a free fountain drink for your wait."

See, Windstream, is that so hard?  You clearly have internet access--after all, you've already made a post some-what acknowledging the issue.  Just let the people know where you stand and don't, I repeat, DON'T delete their comments.