It’s Friday night and you go out to dinner at a nice restaurant that you’ve been looking forward to checking out. Once there, you have slow service or an entrée not cooked to order and it’s frustrating. As you’re walking out, you quickly update your Facebook status about how you won’t be going back there again anytime soon.
I actually watched this happen recently. One of my Facebook friends went to one of the nicer restaurants in Asheville and had what she considered to be poor service and bad food. Upon leaving, she immediately updated her Facebook status with:
“Just had dinner at XXXXXX. Service was terrible and the food was worse. I’ll never go back there again.”
I don’t know if the service or food was really bad, but here’s the real downside. She has 500+ Facebook friends. If you assume that 30% are local (conservative guess after looking a bit), that means that around 150 local people just read that update. For a local restaurant, that’s big considering that many of her coworkers regularly consider this for lunch (within walking distance of her office). That is real revenue gone, or at a minimum, seriously impacted.
There are many statistics available surrounding traditional customer service. They don’t always exactly agree, but they all agree in principle. One poor event takes many outstanding events to rectify. The most common number I’ve ever seen is 17, so we’ll use that. Our 150 friends above, they need 17 positive experiences in that restaurant, assuming they ever go in the first place. That’s 2550 visits with perfect service and amazing food. Now consider the impact from word of mouth and…well you see this isn’t going well for our small business owner. They should be thankful this particular person isn’t a heavy Twitter user as well.
What does this mean for business owners? The way customer service is handled must be changed. 80% of social media use comes from mobile devices. 96% percent of the Generation Y group have signed up on some social media outlet, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Every person must be treated with true respect and the mindset that they have real power to instantly update many, many people in your customer base with that experience, good or bad. If you treat them poorly or outside of their expectations, whatever the business, it will be communicated to a bigger audience than ever before, faster than ever before.
Have you seen something like my true example above? Perhaps you have left poor feedback for some business yourself? Have you addressed your staff with this in mind? Leave a comment about it!
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