Have you ever received bad customer care and felt like complaining? I’m sure you have.
I did last week when I tried to return a BBQ to B&Q. To cut a long story short, they wouldn’t take the return. Rather aggrieved was I, so I said to the staff member that I’ll tweet my bad experience so the world could hear about it.
And that’s the point. We can now broadcast our bad service experiences for the world to hear about.
You’ve heard the story of United Breaks the Guitar haven’t you? United Airlines from the USA, broke a guitar that was owned by a passenger, apparently by mishandling it as hold baggage. After failing to claim compensation, the owner decided to record a song about the event and uploaded it to YouTube.
It went viral, achieving 10 million hits in no time. As a result of the bad publicity, United Airlines share price plummeted by over 10%.
At a conference last autumn, a colleague of mine was so incensed about the absence of soap and the outrageous WiFi charge at the Hilton Hotel, tweeted the fact. Hilton Twitter listeners at Head Office in Dallas, Texas, picked the tweet up and immediately ordered the Hilton in Coventry to run across the road to Tescos to buy a boat load of soap and reduce the WiFi cost with immediate effect.
Now that’s what I call customer service.
What about you and your company? Are you monitoring Tweets and other social media to see what customers are saying about you? Maybe you ought to and be ready to fix any misdemeanours.
I still haven’t heard from B&Q. Maybe I should do a video of a song. I could call it “Don’t buy a BBQ from B&Q” that’s got a good ring to it.
