Photo by Neringa Šidlauskaitė on Unsplash

Funny story: I decided to change my ringtone to a real song by a real band, so I looked up “how to change ringtone on iOS.” I landed on a 1,000-word post that explained the nightmarish process. After decidedly sticking with my stock tunes, I felt like venting a little on Twitter.

Apple has always made it unnecessarily difficult to add and extract files to and from an iOS device, especially ringtones. It has to do with the stronghold on the content routed through iTunes. While it’s fair towards the artists, it’s excruciatingly frustrating for the end user. Surely there’s a way to please both parties. Alas, they’ve yet to implement it.

Shortly after sharing my grievance with fellow Twitter users, I came across this report saying that the world’s population complains 879 billion times a year, mostly on social media. Intrigued (and a little embarrassed), I delved right in.

The VentureBeat study found that Comcast, Walmart, Verizon, Apple, Kraft, Microsoft, Delta, and Amazon are terrible at dealing with complaints via social media. Those who answer customer support questions well (not necessarily very often) include HP, Sony, Nike, AT&T, and (again) Apple.

Facebook, the biggest target with 20% whiner-share, reportedly deals with the complaints best, because it answers to more grievances than any other company out there, and (equally important) because it works with consumers right where they are – on Facebook.

Author Stewart Rogers says businesses usually move the conversation away from social media and over to email, which confuses the user and takes them out of their comfort zone: “…all they are going to do is alienate their customers further,” he said.

Moral of the story? When you reply on their platform of choice, users are left believing that you care. In this day and age, there is no excuse not to have a presence on social media, not just to promote your business, but to maintain it.