Greetings from Kami with Boley Books
I am sure you have heard the old adage about “one bad apple“. If you own a business take heed. With social media exposure, one bad customer experience is all it can take for a business to lose thousands or hundreds of thousands of future revenue—to keep employees that do not care about customer satisfaction is risky business.
I recently went on vacation to my favorite resort in Cozumel (I am a certified diver who has been diving in the Caribbean since 2005) and had a horrid experience with the front desk manager. Not only did Sofia charge us way more than the special that was advertised to us, she also dismissed our attempts at correspondence to correct the issue before our arrival. Upon checking in Sofia continued the cold shoulder by displaying no remorse, empathy, nor any form of apology for the ignored emails and the billing mistake. It isn’t just the monetary discrepancy that we found so distasteful . . . it was mostly her condescension and lack of customer service.
This is an employee that is the first and only point of contact for this boutique resort . . . basically the face of this business. Over the years we have come to love this establishment and most of the staff, but sadly we will not be returning. I will not give my hard-earned dollars to anyone who will have such blatant disregard for me or anyone.
I regularly give out recommendations for places I frequent to my friends and readers. In order to do this, I need to feel assured that those people will always be treated with respect and kindness. Our bad experience was preventable, she had multiple chances to rectify the situation and treat us with kindness. Sofia chose not to. This is a case where “one bad apple“ destroyed a healthy relationship with a valued customer.
You can easily prevent this from happening to your business.
- Train your staff
- Follow-up on any customer issues as they occur
- Be sure employees always treat people with respect
- Protect loyal customers
Building and protecting good customer relations is important to gain a strong word-of-mouth following. “Word-of-mouth” promoters can be the strongest form of advertising for your business (good or bad)—to keep employees who damage your company’s image is risky business indeed!
