Using Social Media to Communicate with Business

I’ve had many challenging experiences related to communicating with a business.  I’ll share two where social media was involved.

The first experience was positive and it was with a sailboat yacht company in San Diego.  I had booked the sailboat to celebrate my girlfriend’s fortieth birthday, and I was going to invite about 30 people to join us.  All plans were set for this surprise party, but as the date drew near, my girlfriend became ill and I was forced to cancel the sail.  There was a ‘ no refund’ policy on the deposit, which was substantial.  I had confirmed that the company was able to fill the timeslot with another client, but they still wanted to keep my deposit.  After several fruitless discussion with the company, I elected to utilize the power of the internet to make my case.  I signed up as a yelp reviewer and posted my dissatisfaction with the company.  I also let the company know that I had posted the comment, and I would take it down as soon as they returned my deposit. 

My deposit was returned the very next day after posting on Yelp.  With this instance, the power of social media’s ‘open forum’, in this case – Yelp.com - enhanced my leverage.

My second experience was with ratemyprofessor.com.  In this instance, the tables were turned and now I was ‘the business’, and I had to respond to a customer (student) comment.   In reviewing student comments and ratings of me as a new instructor, I found some consistent feedback that my organization of material in the classroom could be better.  I felt like this was a great use of social media because I was hearing directly from my customers about something I could improve, and I did!

Conversely, I also found one comment from a student that seemed inappropriate and misguided  - they were rating me for a class I didn’t even teach, although I had a suspicion of who the student was (they had stopped attending after the drop date and ended up with an F).  Here I had to put myself in the shoes of the ‘business’, and defend my service by posting a counter to the student’s rating. 

What I learned was that this ‘open forum’ of customer review sites definitely puts the power in the hands of the consumer.  Most often, this is a good thing, but because anyone can post, we can end up with consumers that abuse the system and the businesses they interact with.  Imagine how frustrating it would be for a small business to be cyber bullied by a disgruntled customer who didn’t get what they want.  These review sites can force small businesses to spend a large amount of time defending themselves.  That said, over time and with a large enough sample of reviews, review sites such as yelp.com and traveladvisor.com are keeping businesses honest and raising the bar on service.