You’ve Been Yelped, Part I: Customers

By on August 3rd, 2010 In Advice

A guest post from our illustrious web/social guru Amanda Blum:

I’ve always really enjoyed the Chowhound community, which was particularly strong in Phoenix. When I moved, the NorthEast boards were a mess, so I started using Yelp instead. I’m not a professional reviewer, but I try to be objective and specific in my contentions and celebrations, rather than simply say, “It sucked. Never going back.”

It’s an interesting intersection that I both enjoy the restaurant scene and represent restaurants professionally, especially in the sphere of social media. How should restaurants respond? What should they takeaway from social media? How should they value these reviews? What should they participate in and/or incentivize?

On Saturday night, I decided to give a second try to a restaurant I’d reviewed as “eh” about 14 months ago.  My parents are fans, and I was treating my mom, so imagine my shock when were seated and the owner came up and publicly berated me for five minutes in front of everyone. The inappropriateness of the tirade was overwhelming on a number of levels. This morning, I learned that a friend of mine had a sub-par experience at a Phoenix restaurant, wrote an appropriate review, and received a completely inappropriate response. It seems timely — so over the next two posts, I plan to talk about both how restaurants should respond to customer complaints, and how customers should complain.

Tips for Having Better Customer Service Experiences

Unequivocally, we’re becoming angrier people. We really enjoy being incensed, and it’s becoming harder for businesses, especially restaurants, to correct situations. We live in an immediate world and many restaurants fear apologizing for problems as it leaves open liability. Often, even when restaurants bend over backward, people still leave angry.

I believe very strongly in having responsive and responsible customer service experiences. If there is something wrong, restaurants should own it and correct it, both long term (change process/supplier/staff, etc.) and short term (make viable amends to affected customer). Both are important: do you ever feel better when a phone rep tells you that they appreciate your reasonable complaint and it will be addressed by management with the employee? Great for the next guy, but you’ve been affected already AND you’ve taken time out to explain your issue with zero return. Just the same, focusing on the customer alone isn’t effective, you’ll have the same issue over and over again if you don’t address the root problem within your business and seek remedy.

All of that said, I demand the same respect and responsibility from the customer: the onus is on you to ensure the following steps are taken:

Communicate the problem.  Too often, people leave a business upset but never take the time to let someone know. How, exactly, do you expect the business to address a problem they may not know they have if you just write them off? Take the time to write that email, make the call or send a letter and remember that its only effective when it goes to an appropriate party. The 15 year old hostess isn’t invested in the business and has no power to remedy. Don’t waste your breath; be sure to get the name of the party you should address.

Communicate reasonably. If you are reasonable, it’s likely the management will be too. But if you yell, are incensed or appear to be unappeasable, the business benefits more by simply ending things as quickly as possible and removing you than actually hearing you out and appreciating what’s said. Communicate in the way you want the business to communicate. Keep it short, objective, and leave your emotion out of it.

Offer resolve. You know what you need from the transaction to be happy and it saves everyone time, energy and anguish if you simply state what a reasonable resolve to the situation would be. Whether its telling a bank, “I would like a refund of these overdraft fees” or telling a restaurant “I would like these entrees removed from the bill” — this is not a negotiation, this is a communication. We often forget, but businesses generally want us happy, give them that path.

Forgive. If in fact you receive the resolve you’ve requested, let it go. The business has done exactly what you wanted. Shit happens and the best you can expect is that people remedy the situation, which this business has. Don’t slam them publicly (but offering an accurate representation of what happened AND how they remedied it is fine) and give them another opportunity to prove themselves. Often, this is all a business wants: a second chance.

It’s your brand, too. The social media pendulum swings both ways. When businesses treat you badly and you say so publicly, its bad for their bottom line. If they respond idiotically (I’m looking at you, Amy), its even worse. But if YOU respond idiotically, its just as bad for you. Reviews on Yelp, etc. are purposely poised for excellent search engine optimization, so when we talk about future employers, boyfriends, girlfriends and senate confirmation committees hitting the Googles for information about you, best believe they’ll stumble across your opuses. If you only get online to complain, your influence will be affected. For that reason its important to:

Reward Good Behavior. Follow all the rules above in offering compliments as well, but be sure to offer them. Businesses need to hear them, just as we need to as individuals. A compliment to a waitress is appreciated, but a compliment to a manager of that waitress is worth 800 times more. Just as with negative comments, compliments that don’t sound reasoned and measured can be interpreted as spam.

Remember, every single time you begin a relationship with anyone, for any reason, you set the parameters of that relationship within the first five minutes. Once they’re set, they are almost impossible to reset — so no matter how upset you are use rational and reasonable thought and actions for the best possible response. If that doesn’t work, then it’s wholly appropriate to begin piecing together voodoo dolls, calling valley printers for flyer quotes or registering that “INSERTNAMEOFCOMPANYSUX!!!!!.com” (it’s only effective in all caps).

Tomorrow: the flip side.

Comments

Beth Cochran Says:
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:59 am

Great post Amanda! Can’t wait to read tomorrow’s follow up piece. Seemed fitting that this post was paired with the “Crisis PR Tips…” piece in today’s email. :)

Charlotte Shaff Says:
August 3rd, 2010 at 11:06 am

Great advice.I look forward to tomorrow’s post. You bring up some great points and angles that I think we as PR pros/businesses sometimes forget in the heat of the situation, such as Forgive and Reward.

Will Says:
August 4th, 2010 at 12:57 am

Good advice to customers, but this is a PR blog not a How To Be A Good Customer So That Business Owners Don’t Get Upset blog.

I absolutely agree that customers in general are whiny children. So why do businesses expect customers to take responsibility for acting more mature? This becomes a parent-child relationship, and parents have unlimited liability whether they like to admit it or not.

What do I mean by this? SET EXPECTATIONS. Train your customers. If you’re frustrated because more than a few customers “just don’t get it” or “act like assholes” it’s probably because they’re reasonable people in an unreasonable situation.

It’s a lot to ask of a business, but do everything you can to correct underlying situations– it probably means improving your branding, marketing, storefront, employee empowerment, training, or something similar. Don’t act surprised when someone gets upset that their $12 coffee tastes like dirt water– maybe you need to rename your place Essence of Coffee instead of Flavors of Coffee. Set Expectations. Train your customers.

Amanda Blum Says:
August 4th, 2010 at 8:10 am

Will, this is a two part piece-the second part will deal with businesses. However,personal branding plays a role in how customers should react which is certainly PR centric, as is social media generally. With so much focus on bad business behavior yesterday, I wanted to address the customer portion first.

I agree that many businesses suffer from an inability to set good expectations. This isn’t on purpose- but learning whether the expectations you’ve set are bad, and how to communicate the right ones requires listening to the right channels, such as social media, and customers learning how to communicate their concerns properly.

As it happens, I don’t believe that customers are generally whiny children. I think that we’ve all lost the ability to communicate effectively. Businesses have forgotten “the customer is always right”. People are given too many opportunities and incentives to be victims. Most of all, we’ve all lost a sense of personal responsibility, regardless.

Daniela @SocialSkoop.com Says:
August 4th, 2010 at 10:09 pm

This is such a great post Amanda. I attend a social media club in my area and we discuss this topic all the time. It is very easy for us to complain and being mindful of business owners is the right thing to do. But what happens when all the blame gets put on the customer, that is what I just recently witnessed. I wrote about it on my blog here: http://bit.ly/9W72Os

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