- Image via CrunchBase
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)
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.
Comments
8 responses to “How NOT To Deal With Negative Feedback On Twitter”
Agree with the gist of the article. I don’t see how Jason Roe was being unreasonable though?
Would have to agree with Paul – I don’t see how Jason was being unreasonable either. However, I do agree with the sentiment of the article and how companies really need to be a little more clever about how they deal with criticism in this indelible mediu. They also need to understand that despite how much they may believe that simply deleting a tweet would repair any damage done, it really doesn’t and if anything, makes matters worse.
I’d say that Jason wasn’t being unreasonable; he was simply expressing an opinion. The company’s response seems unwise.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Michele Neylon, Michele Neylon and Jonathan Brazil, Paul. Paul said: RT @mneylon: @jasonroe in your honour http://blacknig.ht/14a […]
Paul – damn – my wording needs to be rejigged – nicely spotted!
I guess Jason’s language came across as a bit crude there but the response was completely OTT 😀
I reckon it has now been seen by a LOT of twitter people will spread to Facebook and well hey I think there may already even be a blog post about it:D
When a simple “I’m sorry to hear that jason if you’d like to contact us on email / phone we can see what the problem with it was” would have turned the thing into such a public win situation for them it’s simply unbelievable some peoples stupidity. Have these social media expert classes people have been taking taught them nothing at all ? 😀
My own experience recently with something not getting delivered / time constraints to organise collection have resulted in having a completely amazing experience with http://www.gruupy.com/ which I am more than happy to talk about.
I know as a company you can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time but erm … let’s try not to give a completely negative experience to people / potential customers and choose your public facing representatives (whether phone sales / twitter staff/monitors 😀 / support) with a bit of care
James
If you ignore the expletives Jason’s tweet isn’t that crude. It’s not the kind of language I would personally use in a tweet, but as most people know I’m quite picky about that 🙂
Michele
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