Sometimes, good customer service causes a social media crisis.
In short, from StarTribune restaurant critic Rick Nelson: two Saturdays ago, Bob Harper, a minor TV celebrity, decided to eat at Bar La Grassa in downtown Minneapolis that evening. But when his American Express concierge called the restaurant, there were no available tables at the time he wanted, and the manager refused to cancel an ordinary customer’s reservation for him.
That evening, Harper wrote on Twitter “OMG!! The manager at Bar Lagrasa in Minneapolis was SO RUDE to me. I wanted to have dinner there. Why are people so mean sometimes?” and called on his 123,000 followers to “unleash on the manager”. 15 followers called to complain, and many others tweeted about it. Bar La Grassa’s manager had to spend much of a busy evening mollifying Harper’s followers on the phone, and in the longer term, the restaurant’s reputation took a hit.
Could Bar La Grassa have done anything to stop the criticism at its source, rather than addressing the symptoms? It seems absurd for its respect for its ordinary customers to have caused a social media mess – and yet because the truth wasn’t out there until Nelson’s blog post, that’s exactly what happened.
The restaurant missed the mark when it decided to have no presence on Twitter, and more so when it didn’t get on Twitter once the complaints started coming in.
It’s understandable – Twitter can be frustrating to manage when it’s not your job. In any small business, there’s a dozen things that each person needs to do at a time, many necessary just to make the product and keep the business going. Composing the perfect tweet often falls to a distant last on the to-do list.
Yet in a customer service business – like most restaurants and indeed most businesses – it’s essential to respond to your customers’ criticisms not only when they’re right, but also when they’re wrong.
On the one hand, the Twitter megaphone amplifies criticism, but on the other, it makes that criticism something you can engage with. If a customer (or unsuccessful customer like Harper) complains on Twitter, it reaches a lot of people – and then you can reach those people too with your perspective.
A reasoned tweet or two explaining how they always honored reservations and pointing out alternative options for Harper (going at a different time or sitting in the open bar seating) might have defused the situation with Harper right away and won Bar La Grassa a great deal of respect for looking out for its ordinary customers.
Talk to your customers where they are. They eat downtown, so you build a restaurant downtown. They talk online, so it’s important to talk with them online. Plus it doesn’t have to be that time-consuming to monitor social channels with TweetDeck or similar software, with searches or alerts set to keywords related to your business. Some customers are always going to be fans, and some you’re never going to please. But by keeping aware of their conversations, at least you can be sure that if they’re unhappy, it’s for legitimate reasons.
(and at the very least, don’t be like the UAE restaurant that sued a customer for his criticism!)