Mystery Dinner Playhouse

Now and again, every business gets customer complaints.  Usually, it’s a phone call or email, but the marketplace has entered a new era where complaints come in the form of a bad online comment or review.  Rather than contact a business directly to resolve an issue, a customer may decide to go directly online to express their displeasure.  The problem with this current trend is that no one wins.  The customer may have vented their frustration and feel somewhat vindicated, but they have not had their issue resolved because they didn’t contact the company they have a problem with.  The company, in turn, loses because they have no idea that the customer had a problem with a product or service, and their reputation is tarnished without their knowledge leaving them unable to resolve the issue.  This is becoming more and more common; bringing a new challenge to businesses seeking to maintain and improve customer relations and quality control.

This happened to us recently.  A group of ladies attended our Williamsburg location last weekend and one member of the group went on her blog and posted her disappointment with our establishment.  It was a long post and it tagged our business name and location, making it easier for search engines to pick it up and post the complaint for millions to see.

Here’s how we found out about it and what we did to resolve the issue to everyone’s satisfaction:

Google Alerts.  If you are a business owner, or if you are just curious about what is being said about you personally on the internet, Google Alerts is a great tool, and it’s free!  Basically, you tell the service what you want to be alerted to – it could be your personal name, business name, competitor’s name – whatever.  The service then aggregates the internet and searches for anything that contains those words.  You can set up your “alerts” to send notices to you in intervals (daily, weekly, etc). You will receive anything from news services, blogs or the web in the form of a headline and a link; much like a listing that appears in a search engine.  You can then click on the link and see in detail what is being said about you – the good and the bad.

We signed up for the service a few months back and it has been really helpful for reputation management and for just keeping tabs on what is being said about us, our industry and our competitors.  We choose to receive notices once a day.  So, on Monday AM, I received a notice about the blog entry that our audience member had posted the previous day.  What’s great is that you can receive notices immediately, although it’s not always that quick.  Sometimes we’ll get something that’s several months old, which isn’t good if you need to do some damage control.  The system is not perfect.

Anyway, we immediately sent our customer a response via posting a comment on her blog.  She responded the next morning and the problem was resolved amicably. She removed the original complaint on her blog and replaced it with a very nice mention about how we handled her complaint and resolved it to her satisfaction.  Everyone wins!  I’m not saying that we won her back as a customer, but she appreciated our quick response and willingness to resolve the issue the way she wanted it resolved.  In return, she went online and told everyone about it.

Here’s a link to her blog post:

http://ebonymompolitics.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/a-grateful-shout-out-to-james-daab-owner-of-mystery-dinner-playhouse-in-williamsburg-va/

Our advice to all of you out there is to do as we did – if, and when you need to.  By all means, sign up for Google Alerts.  It’s a great service and it’s free!