It’s 9 p.m. on Saturday evening and a disgruntled customer posts a scathing review on your company’s Facebook page about the service she received earlier that day in one of your stores. Other customers quickly begin to pile on to the comments, adding their own personal experiences at other stores, both good and bad. By Monday morning, there are over 100 comments, most of them expressing quite a lot of emotion and many of them angry as they speak directly to your company in this online forum. With no one armed with appropriate responses to diffuse the situation or actively monitoring your online platforms, the single comment has spiraled out of control. Not only will many man-hours be used to address the situation, but your company’s credibility has been marred and consumer confidence is weakened.

We all know that the usage of social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Yelp has continued to evolve at a breakneck pace in the last few years, rendering it almost impossible to keep up. Heap on to that the new definition of the multichannel customer’s behavior, expectations and the current online “say anything” culture and you have a new paradigm that allows customers a direct, always-accessible platform to express their happiness, disappointment and sometimes real anger. Not many years ago, it was adequate to manage and address customer online posts and dialogs as time allowed. Those days are permanently gone, replaced with a non-negotiable need for a sense of urgency in managing these platforms with a seriousness that your company’s reputation depends upon. It’s a newly defined dimension of customer service.

Until a crisis or firestorm erupts in their online space, many companies don’t understand or take the importance of their online reputation seriously. If there’s no overarching digital customer service and marketing management strategy, the costs can be high. Reasons leadership may not view this as a priority or invest in the resources to manage their online presence can be lack of understanding, disagreement there should be budget and resource allocation to support, or no one is at the “decision-making helm” of this new digital area.

In the early days of e-commerce, businesses set up customer service staff to answer toll-free product or order phone calls as well as customer emails. Next came various forms of chat, with some retailers recently testing chatbot technology to answer basic, repeated inquires in an effort to decrease the expense of live agents.

However, as social media platforms evolved, retailers set up accounts, first Facebook, but also others such as Twitter and Instagram. By having a presence on any of these platforms, customer behavior has evolved, with the expectation that you hear their voice and respond equally in all channels, as if they were speaking directly to a call-center agent. They don’t have an understanding that you may only facilitate a “push” or one-way marketing or sales communication in the social space. Many customers take their customer service complaints to social media, Yelp or even the online product review platforms within your website.

Because customer experience continues to be a key differentiator in determining where customers will choose to repeatedly spend their money, your company must develop and maintain a customer service response strategy for the online social platforms and product reviews. Never has it been more important to take your online reputation seriously and continuously monitor and respond to customers. Gaining your customer’s confidence and maintaining your digital credibility is an active, ongoing process that you can’t afford to ignore.

Linda Mihalick is the senior director of the Global Digital Retailing Research Center at the University of North Texas.