Category Archives: Huh?

June 5, 2015 · 9:26 am

Chili’s (Again!)

Today’s Foodie Friday Fun really isn’t, but it’s definitely instructive. I’m sure you’ve been told to watch your drink when you go to a bar and never to leave it unattended for fear that someone might put something in it. One would hope that the person doing so isn’t a disgruntled employee.

A couple went to Chili’s and their server didn’t like that they were complaining about how their meal was prepared. They ordered a couple of drinks to go and the server spit in them. This was discovered when the lid popped off as the couple left. A quick return to Chili’s produced a refund and coupons for future meals (you’re kidding, right?  Who would go back?) but the couple wasn’t done. They took the cup to the police who took a DNA sample from the spit and from the server who denied doing anything. Busted! You can read a full account of this tale here.

There are so many things wrong here it’s hard to know where to begin. First, how is the staff not told that if the food isn’t prepared to the customer’s liking it’s a kitchen issue, not a service issue. Servers are customer service reps – they are there to help the customer. Period. Their job is to fix problems, not to cause them.  If there is an issue they can’t handle, escalate it to a manager. In this case, the server apparently took a kitchen issue personally.

Second – the server wasn’t fired on the spot. As a result the couple has sued Chili’s, the waiter, and Chili’s parent company.  In fact, he’s still working there.  What sort of statement does that make to the rest of the staff (yes, the server admitted to spitting in the drink after the DNA test)?  In this case the server felt put upon by the complaints the customer had.  What if another server has an issue with a customer’s race?  The story has been widely reported – would this be your first stop if you were nearby?  If a questionable social media post gets people fired, how does inducing this sort of negative reporting not?

Don’t kid yourself.  This sort of thing can happen in your business too.  A quick search for “service rep threatens customer” provides over a million results.  If you have customers (let’s hope!), anyone who interacts with them needs to understand the standards of acceptable behavior and when they need to escalate a problem upwards.  There is no circumstance in which doing what this server did is acceptable and he should have been fired immediately.

I realize I went off on Chili’s just a few Fridays ago and I’m not picking on them.  It’s interesting that their sales aren’t great, though, and it’s not a stretch to wonder if maybe there is a system wide issue when you read things such as this.  It’s a good reason for each of us to reexamine how we do things, don’t you think?

Leave a comment

Filed under food, Huh?

Tagged as , , , ,

June 4, 2015 · 9:50 am

Where The Devil Lives

I received an email this morning which asked me to enter a sweepstakes. Since it involved golf I was all ears and quickly filled out the form – name, and email. This led me to a second form which read “Just answer the following four questions and your entry wil (sic) be complete.” Let’s put aside the typo for a second. That request was followed by a form with three questions, not four. After scratching my head, I answered and received a confirming email. That read, in part, “We’re announcing the winner July 31, 2015, until then we wanted to let you know how you can start…” Another typo/grammatical error.

I can hear some of you saying “stop being so picky.” Here is the problem and it’s one that affects anyone in business. These mistakes demonstrate a complete lack of attention to detail. They have me asking myself if I want to do business with this company and would I trust them with my personal information? If you’ve ever run a sweepstakes you know that everything must be scrutinized carefully – the FTC and others are NOT happy when you mess something up. Multiple people must have reviewed these materials and yet…

Ask yourself how many pitch decks you’ve seen with typos or errors in grammar. Then ask yourself how many websites you read with the same sorts of mistakes. I get apps updating every day for “bug fixes.” Sometimes they’re just fixing things that should have been caught in the testing and quality control phases of development.  You can’t QC something by releasing it, not if you expect to keep a customer base.

I don’t mean to be harsh here but the devil really is in the details. To me this stuff is like going on a job interview dressed in a t-shirt and cutoffs. It’s a horrible first impression, one that is usually disqualifying.

As businesspeople, standards are one of the few things we CAN control.  We need to make sure everyone on the team is clear about the standards and then we need to hold them to those standards, especially when we’re dealing with marketing materials or anything else destined for external viewing.

Details matter.  You can call that picky.  I call it putting your best foot forward.  Do you agree?

1 Comment

Filed under Helpful Hints, Huh?

Tagged as , , , ,

June 2, 2015 · 10:09 am

Talk To The Hand

Sometimes I feel as if I’m picking on the same companies all the time.  It’s not intentional, I swear.  It’s just that some brands seem to find stupid things to do and push corporate behavior standards to a new low.  With that disclaimer, let us ruminate over the good folks at Spirit Airlines and their latest genius move:

Florida-based Spirit Airlines, the ultra-low-cost carrier, is taking a different tack. Spirit has instead put a robot in control of its Twitter operation to automatically respond to questions.

“A big social media team costs money, so we put our feed on autopilot to save you cents on every ticket,” the airline explains on its Twitter site.

You can’t make this up.  What have we learned about marketing over the last ten years or so?  Your list of words might include “conversation”, “listen”, “personalized”, and any number of other terms that are diametrically opposed to a robot.  Tweet something to Spirit’s “customer service” account and you get the same automated message as the last guy:  a link to a website with FAQ‘s and a list of phone numbers.  While I haven’t actually called any of those numbers (since I refuse to set foot on a Spirit flight ever again), one hopes that there is an actual human on the other end.   Which raises the obvious question – if you’re paying for CSR’s for one channel (the phone), why not do so for another, more convenient and widely used channel (social media)?

Here is yet another business decisions that’s selfish.  Spirit thinks it can save money by not paying someone to work on social, and will allegedly pass those savings on.  You believe that?  If so, I have oceanfront property in Arizona for you.  If a track record shows us anything, this is a brand that will find a way to wring every last penny out of its customers (first to charge baggage fees, first to charge carry-on fees, first to charge to print a ticket, first to charge to pick a seat – shall I go on?).  How stupid do they think consumers are?

Put Spirit’s move in this context from today’s Media Post:

Overall, 47% of tweets about the five biggest U.S. carriers (United, American, Delta, Southwest, and JetBlue) were negative, compared to just 20% positive, Crimson Hexagon found. The total volume of tweets mentioning these airlines has increased 209% since January 2012.

Is that a channel you want to ignore as an airline (or any other brand)?  Is the message “talk to the hand because the ears ain’t listening” really how any brand wants to be perceived?  Robots? I think not.  You?

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, digital media, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , ,