Kevin Smith: He's Mad As Hell. Image from ViewAskew.com

I’ve never been one to suggest that “the customer is always right.” Having worked as a cashier in my high school years (an experience I think every North American should have), I can tell you emphatically that the customer is indeed not always right. Sometimes the customer is just plain wrong. And mean. And even a complete idiot.

But just because bad customers exist does not mean a business can or should counter them with bad customer service. The danger in allowing any level of poor customer service to be dished out is that it’s too easy for employees and business owners to stay in that mode and become indignant to customers who may not fit the mold of your ideal client, but are, in fact, right about a situation and what they should expect from you.

Before, if you screwed over a customer, the most you could expect is that you lost their business. Perhaps they’d tell their friends. If they were REALLY angry, they’d write a letter to somebody. Not any more. With the gaining popularity of social media, word of mouth now has a microphone. Give someone crappy service, they’re going to get loud about it, and some people have pretty impressive microphones.

This weekend, writer / director Kevin Smith was asked to leave a Southwest Airlines flight on account of a “safety issue.” The safety issue? Someone at Southwest determined Smith was too large for just one seat and required two – but as a second seat was unavailable, they opted to eject him from the flight. They did this, despite the fact – according to Smith – that he fit into one seat and between the armrests – the apparent gauge of measurement Southwest uses to determine whether a “Customer of Size” requires more than one seat.

While still in the airport waiting for the next flight, Smith took to Twitter, where he has 1.6+ million followers (a good chunk more than Southwest’s Twitter feed has) and started describing his experience in the colorful language Smith is well-known for.

Hundreds of people started tweeting Smith with their own humiliating stories of Southwest’s treatment, with a fury not entirely unlike the “Mad as Hell!” scene from Network, which Smith was only too happy to retweet to his followers.  Southwest reacted with a blog post, one that many people, based on the comments, felt was inappropriate and lacking. While we’re the first to applaud content marketing and social media usage, the emphasis is on content. Smith provided his full side of the story, complete with a part about a fellow Southwest passenger who experienced the same treatment on Smith’s flight, in his latest podcast SModcast #106 (in case you weren’t sure, the language within it is NSFW, so plug those headphones in!).

An ineffective customer service issue has now become a giant PR crisis. Happy Monday, Southwest.

Smith is hardly the first to take to Twitter, Facebook, blogs or Podcasts to complain about sub-standard customer service. Heather Armstrong, a blogger behind the exceptionally popular site, Dooce, let Maytag have it when the company was less than responsive when her new washing machine broke in late August. And it’s not just “celebs” who are taking a stand when customer service has failed them. Yours truly received better service from Netfirms after snarking on Twitter about how lame my service experience had been. A friend of mine received local news coverage after complaining about a restaurant’s treatment of a customer via her blog and Twitter.

Want to avoid this? What should you do if you own a business?

1. Treat each customer as if they might have a million Twitter followers. They might. Or they might be friends with someone who does. Or the “pithy” 400 followers they do have might retweet to their followers and theirs and so on. After all, that’s how the Motrin scandal got started – by non-celeb social media users.
2. Review your policies. Take a look at your policies and see if there are any aspects of them that would give your customers a legitimate reason to be upset. If those policies can’t be changed, make sure they are communicated to customers and staff clearly and that you have a sensitive and consistent way of enforcing them.
3. Expect more from your staff. Train them well. Check up on their service. Give them incentives to treat customers well such as stock / ownership options or bonuses.
4. Don’t be afraid to apologize and admit where you went wrong.
5. Make sure you’re engaged in social media monitoring. To its credit, Southwest has been monitoring and involved in social media and this situation. Is it handling it right? You be the judge!
6. Take care of the customer in question first, and the public interest in the scandal second. According to Smith, the top customer service executives at Southwest had NOT contacted him despite the blog post suggesting they had. Certainly give your audience a heads-up in the medium they’re using (Twitter) that you’re aware and dealing, but make sure that first customer is prioritized.
7. Understand crisis communications in a web 2.0 world. Take a look at our tips for avoiding a social media faux pas and tips for reacting to a social media bomb, part 1 and part 2.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 8:12 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.