Greg Barila: In wake of Victory Hotel fight, businesses shouldn’t hit back at angry customers on Facebook
IF you have a business with a social media account, especially Facebook, this is the best free advice you will get this week.
- The Victory Hotel’s Facebook fight that started this debate
- How an ill-judged Facebook post could cost you a fortune
- Bombay Bicycle Club apologises after calling customers idiots
- Angry pub owner: This was blown out of proportion by Twitter trolls
THE first rule of business? The customer is always right.
Rule two: if the customer is wrong, go back and read rule one.
It really isn’t a difficult concept to get your head around. So why do so many businesses get it so horribly wrong?
The answer, evidently, is that so few of them understand the power and pitfalls of social media.
The past few years are littered with examples of SA businesses that have brought shame and derision upon themselves for the way they’ve handled (or mishandled) a customer issue via social media, where grievances can be quickly blown out of all proportion, doing the business at the centre of the storm serious financial and reputational damage.
Damage sometimes that’s impossible to come back from.
The popular Victory Hotel at Sellicks Beach is just the latest local establishment to highlight what a minefield customer service in the digital age can be.
To his credit, hotelier Doug Govan was quick to admit he let his emotions get the better of him when he unleashed a nasty and personal attack on an unsatisfied customer in a Facebook post in the hotel’s name.
“I lost it a little bit there, as you can see,” Mr Govan told The Advertiser, adding that sometimes businesses should sometimes “fire up and give as good as they get” in the face of unfair treatment by difficult and unreasonable customers.
In my view, that is flawed thinking that fundamentally misunderstands the “customer-is-always right” philosophy.
Because by definition that philosophy recognises that of course the customer is not always right, that sometimes customers are stupid, horrible, mean and rude, but that it is a mark of a good business to always be the more mature party in the equation.
Whether the customer group in this situation was at fault — and I’m not saying they were — is wholly beside the point.
What matters most of all is how a business handles a complaint and as Mr Govan has himself admitted, the hotel botched it.
You should never speak to your customers that way. End of story.
A lot of businesses seem to be completely bamboozled by the mystical powers of social media but the platforms are not the point. Good customer service is good customer service.
If you wouldn’t tell a customer to “go shove it” to their face, you shouldn’t do it via their Facebook page.
It would have taken hotel management zero extra effort to acknowledge the customer’s complaint and take it offline for resolution — and saved a lot of heartache and negative attention in the process.
Mr Govan is right about one thing: “Every now and then people use social media to slam hotels without thinking about the hurt it can cause.”
It’s easy to fire off an angry tweet or post a toxic diatribe about a brand or business when picking up the phone or sending a thoughtful email may be a better, more effective way to let an organisation know they fell short of your expectations and give them constructive feedback on how they might do better next time.
Punters should also know defamation laws very much extend to social media and there are mounting examples where ordinary citizens have found themselves in legal strife for airing their dirty laundry via their own personal social media accounts.
But for better or worse, social media is a fact of life in 2017.
And increasingly it is where customers are turning instinctively to share their experiences with taxi companies, dress shops, restaurants, even news organisations.
It’s about time businesses started seeing these powerful platforms as an opportunity to do what they do better and not place to go to war with the very people they are there to serve.