Valentine’s Day Social Media Massacre

Interflora’s Facebook and Twitter accounts have taken a hammering from unhappy customers, plus intended recipients of Valentine’s Day flowers, complaining about late deliveries and flower bouquets that failed to arrive. There were also complaints about ’mouldy’ bottles of wine, underwhelming flowers and spelling mistakes on greetings cards.

Interflora had promised customers Valentine’s Day delivery on all orders placed before 1pm the day before but it appears from tweets and Facebook posts that they couldn’t fulfil their promise.

Their social media managers have been in overdrive with a continuous stream of apologetic tweets and posts to an army of unhappy people from around 4pm on Valentine’s Day. Not all complaints have been replied to and they still haven’t stopped.

@antoncymru Hi Anthony, We are deeply sorry that your flowers turned up 3 days late, please confirm your order number

— Interflora Flowers (@InterfloraUK) February 18, 2014

This episode shows that whilst social media gives you the opportunity to respond and resolve problems, you’ll need to ensure that you have the resources to manage and respond to communications from customers. Social media can’t resolve poor service or products. If you don’t fulfil your promises or live up to customer’s expectations, unhappy and possibly angry customers are going to be broadcasting their experiences across social media.

Here’s another example from Facebook plus one from Twitter:

Judging from their twitter acct, it looks like I’m maybe one of 100s of customers whose @InterfloraUK Valentines orders was never delivered.

— D. (@libertinegrrl) February 16, 2014

 

Thank you to @SueKelsoRyan for spotting this example and flagging it up. If you notice an interesting or newsworthy example of social media, please let me know.

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