Reputation Management Cost  - “Looks are deceiving”

This is a little story I’d like to share with you and reputation management cost and customer service.

I don’t like to people about my age. I don’t have a reason or need to. Especially when I am about to buy myself something where clearly you have to be a certain age to buy certain products. So, it’s a late night and I’m bored.  I go to the store and I buy one 22 ounce IPA and a pizza and of course get my Redbox DVD using my free coupon code.

While it was eleven minutes to closing time, this clerk really just wanted to give me a very hard time for making such simple purchase. I handed him my ID without even being asked.

This is how the following interaction proceeded.

He looked at myID and stroked his chin.

He looked at me square in the face and stroked his moustchae now.

He looked back down at my ID and started to wave and pointing it at me.

Then looked at me. Then looked at my ID again. Stroked his chin. And then looked at me again.

I’m sitting there thinking to myself. “I need to tell this guy I just made the driver’s license this morning.”

Normally I don’t wear glasses. I wear contacts like I did in my driver’s license. Of course tonight though, my hair is a mess and I am I have glasses on. He says my eyes aren’t blue. They are green. I tell them they are blue.  He proceeds to ask me then well what color do my contacts make my eyes normally.

So I piped off at him and said, “Green, Blue, Hazel. This is me. Here is a picture of me on my credit card with a picture on it.” He then (couldn’t tell if he wanted to continue being Mr. Funny Guy or not)  and said that looked blurry too. Now at this point I was getting rather frustrated.

So I where am I going with this rant?

Twofold: Customer service and the reputation management cost

Every now and then I’ll act like a twenties something punk with a an air of cockiness displayed. I’ll be the first to admit it.

However, why do you or would you want your employees, the very front end of your customer service ever talk to any of your customers like that? It just didn’t make sense to me. If I had become irrational and mad at that interation, I easily could have blogged about it or wrote a review on a Yelp or Yellow Pages listing and made it very negative.

This would cost their business many times over. And it literally could be fatal. One negative review from someone online can ruin an entire offline business.

When was the last time you Googled your business, your product name, or your own name? What are other people, former customers, current clients actually saying about you online?

I knowningly wasn’t doing anything illegal or wrong. I was even trying to get a rise out of the guy for any reason. So what gives? It’s this kind of interaction that happens to make people go over the deep end – even for simple stuff.

If you run a brick and mortar place have you run an audit as to how your employees/associates/partners/whoever the front face of your business is treats your customers?

All it takes is one negative review online from Google Places or Yelp to screw up your entire business in the real world. Everyone has a voice now. And you cannot stop them. Yes you can do damage control but why not prevent that in the first place. Reputation management cost are not cheap by any means.

When you have an employee that says “I can’t do anything about xyz…” is that really the case? Almost in all cases small businesses can take care of their customers easily. You are not bogged down by thick policy and procedures book. You are the immediate decision maker.

If a customer’s request is reasonable, isn’t it just good business sense to take care of them?

Tags: age, age perception 038 stupidity 8211 reputation management cost, certain age, closing time, customer service, funny guy, hard time, management, reputation management, square in the face