One of the exciting and often scary aspects of Twitter and other social media networks is that your customer service interactions are completely laid bare. You can’t hide behind closed doors. Nothing is sacred.

Earlier today Jason Roe tweeted about how bad his coffee tasted.

It was a statement of opinion. It doesn’t mean that there is anything necessarily wrong with a product or a brand, but that a particular customer (Jason), had a bad experience.

No matter what you do some of your customers will not be happy. In some cases it will be your fault – you’ll screw up. In other cases it won’t be your fault.

It doesn’t matter. It will happen regardless.

So how did this exchange go down and why am I even bothering to write about it?

Have a look at the response from the coffee vendor (screenshot from Tweetdeck as the original tweet was deleted much later)

How not to deal with customer feedback

Here’s the plain text version of the exchange:

Tasted my coffee bean from badger and dodo this morning. They were over roasted! burnt to shit, crumbled when pressure applied. Smelt crap.

And their reply:

@jasonroe nasty & vindictive of you! We have a complaints & refund proceedure you can follow. 40 cafes using same coffee have no complaints!

What makes it all the more amusing (and disturbing) is that the company not only handled this particular incident badly, but also managed to lose an advocate in the process:

@BadgerAndDodo the gas thing is .. I was one of your advocates until 19:04. Well done!

The company in question have since deleted the offending tweet, but they haven’t (as of now) offered any form of apology to Jason (or anyone else)

Now, was Jason being reasonable?

Did the company completely overreact?

I’d say yes to both of those questions.

How about you?

UPDATE: Jason has posted his own version of events as well as an email that the coffee company sent him.