Politics & Current Events
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Re: Wow. Customer service/Social Media FAIL
I can understand tweeting about a situation after making a failed attempt to resolve an issue directly. However going to Twitter first before even trying to resolve the issue is stupid. People need to learn how to actually TALK to other people again.
Yes, I agree. Twitter is a VERY effective way to communicate customer service issues. Companies usually want satisfied customers, especially if they are talking about their experience online and often linking their comments to the company's twitter or FB account. Most companies bend over backwards to rectify bad situations if they are tagged or mention on twitter and the comment is less than positive. Even if no solution is offered, tweeting someone's personal information, such as a physical address is just abhorent. There is no excuse for that.
40/112
Do you call the company first, or do you send off unsatisfied tweets so that their first contact with you is negative?
Because I'm not down with the latter. Call first, see what their deal is, and then if you're still unsatisfied, tweet your heart out. Using twitter as first line of communication is uncouth and bullying.
Twitter IS a way to TALK with people. You can direct a message to the actual company and ask a question or have them resolve an issue. It's just in a public way. My company uses instant messaging sometimes internally, because it's a quick way to talk with each other - quicker than walking to another office, using email, or sometimes even calling the other person (especially if you are in the middle of something). How is that not appropriate? Twitter is just a new form of communicating.
Then again, people thought the phone was much too impersonal when that was invented. Rude to not give people the respect of actually visiting their house and stuff...
40/112
You know, I have tweeted complaints about at least one company AND the D.C. government and gotten immediate response and resolution to my problem (I always go back and tweet that suchandsuch fixed the problem, thanks so much).
Sometimes you can get a quicker response via social media than you can get through traditional means, i.e. the customer service lines.
ETA: That said, I still think the posting of the address, this long blog rant, the emails to lists, folks invoking frat brothers and their reach etc was doing the most and unnecessary.
The obvious solution here is for vendors to put out a number to TEXT your complaint to. Makes everyone happy - no one has to call anyone, but you can directly Qwerty-key your angst to the party in question without airing it out to Tweeples the world over.
Except... that's where it is and where it's headed even more so in the future. Plus you've got sites like Yelp where you can post your review (wordy or otherwise) directly to Facebook and Twitter, whether you voiced your disappointment/praise to the company or not. But if they're smart, they've got an eye on the social media realm for feedback and criticism, and if they're even smarter they'll use that to build and keep their clientele base. Hell, even Gina Bee has a freakin' Google alert to let her know we were talking about her, and she came her to nurse her image. Works for me.
Not to be snarky, but can we review the timeline of what actually happened in this case?
1) Gina decides to place and order through GrubHub
2) Order is late - Gina comments on twitter about GrubHub and long wait times
3) GrubHub contacts Gina, apologies (way to go GH) and offers to contact the restaurant
4) Flavor180 contacts Gina to tell her they were busy, but to try ordering again
5) Gina orders again; food is once again beyond acceptably late
6) Gina tweets a couple of things, more specifically, these things:
7) An HOUR AND 45 MINUTES after she placed her order, Gina CALLS the restaurant to check on her food. The restaurant is unapologetic about the long wait, the food arrives cold again, but the Flavor 180 suggests that she order again an they will make it up to her. [Notice, please, that Gina actually DID call the restaurant before tweeting their name]
8) An unhappy Gina tweets the following:
9) A friend of Gina tweets at her that she should try a different ordering company. Gina responds with this:
Flavor180 tweets back (see, companies do follow twitter, and it is an effective customer service tool) this:
The thing is, Gina DID call them, and they told her there was nothing they could do about the wait. The MPA is a reference to Gina's high school, and is pretty hella creepy, but whatever.
Gina responds with the following:
10) Gina's partner, who happened to like his meal, decided to give Flavor180 one more chance. Gina advised him to CALL rather than use GrubHub, which he did, and advised him to ask about delivery time. When he learned the delivery time, he tried to cancel the order, but they hung up on him
11) At this point, Flavor180 goes all privacy-violations insane and tweets the following:
12) Gina has to call Flavor180 MULTIPLE times to ask them to take down her PRIVATE HOME ADDRESS - which she still had difficulty getting removed - and is treated like *** by management before receiving an apology and having the offending tweet removed.
13) A still-pissed-off Gina (and, again, please, somewhere here tell me that they'd be perfectly fine with a company posting their home address on Twitter), decides to email all her friends/contacts to tell them the story.
14) Flavor180 calls Gina, irate, about the email, and manages to throw out a lot of racist comments during the exchange.
15) Gina, more incensed now that she's had to deal with a racist asshat of a manager instead of just a piss-poor example of a customer service rep, writes this blog post.
I'm sorry, but I'm having serious problems trying to figure out exactly how Gina is the one in the wrong here.
"You don't get to be all puke-face about your kid shooting your undead baby daddy when all you had to do was KEEP HIM IN THE FLUCKING HOUSE, LORI!" - doctorwho
I understand the order of events quite clearly, thanks. She publicly tweeted first, which immediately puts the companies on defensive, to rectify the situation. A call to Grub Hub, and a call to the restaurant should be the first thing people should do. You, the tweeter, are immediately escalating the situation by putting your complaint out on a public message forum. Obviously her phone works because she was able to call them later after the situation blew up.
Phone calls will always trump tweets. You can clearly explain the situation, and if the person on the other end has any questions, they can be answered immediately.
Let's be honest, people like complaining online because that usually means they can bully the company into getting whatever they want. Why else would you put your disgruntlement out there for the world to see if this was a company's first infraction?
Again, the restaurant should not have put her personal information online. That was uncalled for.
Pixy, she did NOT publicly tweet Flavor180's name first. At all.
She tweeted GrubHubs name, but they (being the apparently awesome company that they are) apparently didn't seem to mind.
She ONLY tweeted Flavor180's name AFTER she had called them and received craptastic customer service and no resolution to her issue.
"You don't get to be all puke-face about your kid shooting your undead baby daddy when all you had to do was KEEP HIM IN THE FLUCKING HOUSE, LORI!" - doctorwho
I don't see how this is any different than someone giving a review on the quality of service received on sites such as yelp, open table, urbanspoon, etc. Outside of Twitter, there are tons of places online to leave a review and we don't consider this an issue, nor an indication of the reviewer's ego. I don't get it.
I agree, but sitting there waiting for 90 minutes for delivery from a restaurant 10 minutes away is kind of silly. If she'd called repeatedly in that 90 minute time span and asked if the food was on it's way, I would be more inclined to side with her.
Seattle doesn't have great delivery options, though. Most of my to-go meals when we lived in the city were from restaurants within easy walking distance and people don't much give a rat's ass if you roll up in a restaurant for a to-go order wearing super casual clothes.
The one time I did try a delivery service it was super overpriced ($10/entree for delivery) and the food was crappy and cold when it arrived. I just didn't use the service again.
I am the Lee that Gina is referencing in her blog post. I have been reading these posts and I am really appalled by some of the comments. WE ARE THE VICTIMS HERE. These blog posts were not written because we had bad service. We complained to the restaurant and grub hub about. If it had ended there we would have quietly stopped patronizing them and that would be it. This is about the fact that they violated our privacy by posting our address on twitter! It is not because Gina is entitled or full of herself. The only entitlement we claim is that of decent customer service. I went back a 3rd time because I believe in patronizing local independent businesses (because I own one myself) and giving people a chance when they make mistakes. Have you ever heard of 3 strikes? I think some of you need to take the time to fully read through Gina?s blog post instead of half- way glancing at it and making comments that don?t make sense.
OMG, they were VICTIMS, YO! VICTIMS!!
There is no getting around the fact that the restaurant was acting like damned fools from the get. Their service sucked, their customer service was nil, and it's completely unacceptable to tweet someone's home address simply because they are legitimately pissed that the business can't handle their shiit.
But there's also an awful lot of me, me, me up in that post and yes, it's utterly ridiculous that Gina decided to vaguebook/tweet first instead of calling the restaurant to find out the status of her order. I mean shiiit, fb and twitter isn't going to get your food to you faster. Hell, she could have biitched on twitter at the same time as she was calling the restaurant directly but she really should have contacted them first.
Just as Gina's tone doesn't excuse their behavior, their behavior doesn't excuse Gina's I KNOW PEOPLE tone.
Click me, click me!
Take your own advice.
The only thing worse than flying all over the internet to defend yourself against a tepid "attack" by random internet peeps is bringing your boyfriend to help.
Click me, click me!
Yeah... now it's getting excessive.
I can't believe I almost never clicked on this thread.
bringing the boyfriend is the act of a beebee bride. this is not nest worthy behavior, and we have a HELLA low bar. i mean, LOW. like, impossible to do in Limbo low.
The same reason people use drive-thru -- convenience. Y'all act like you have never had delivery before, WTF. Next to "go get your own food", this is prolly the silliest comment in this thread.
I'm intrigued by this statement, because I've often tweeted to a company about a customer service issue and have always had a satisfactory resolution without a company getting defensive. Often times it's a million times faster than if I called and sat on hold.
In fact, I would argue that the companies who use Twitter to respond to customer service complaints have a higher customer satisfaction.
e.g. our power went out a couple weeks ago and I tweeted at the power co about it while H rolled his eyes at me and called. I got a response within a minute or so and it took another 10 minutes of hold time before H got a response.
food blog | garden blog | curly dogs blog
Actually, no, that is not always the case. In fact, you can be sued for ish you put on the web about companies. Whether or not they can win is besides the point cause you may still have to lay out cash defending yourself.
But, if I have a choice between sitting in customer service, press this button, press that button hell and posting a (carefully thought out and not flippant) tweet and getting a response, then I will be a gotdayum attention whore.
And I am mad as hell that I am now defending this chick.
::snort::
I have a hard time feeling sorry for people who live 10 minutes from a restaurant, spend 90 minutes waiting for second-party delivery from said restaurant, then get butthurtz and instead of not ordering from there again, order from the same restaurant twice more with the same results.
Then get on the internet and complain about how message board people are mean and rude and we don't know their life.
Then they get their boyfriend involved.
Yeah, I'm the silly one.
(Disclaimer: The restaurant was wrong to publish their personal information. That sucked. The rest of the story, though, is totally laughable.)
Dude, no. No, no, no, no, no.
Ditto this. Seriously Gina and Lee - you should have quit while you were ahead.
"You don't get to be all puke-face about your kid shooting your undead baby daddy when all you had to do was KEEP HIM IN THE FLUCKING HOUSE, LORI!" - doctorwho
But when you're calling a restaurant, you aren't sitting in customer service, pressing buttons and resisting the urge to throw the phone because the voice automated system keeps getting triggered by random baby cooing (or is that just me?)
We're talking about a late/missing food order. Even if she ordered from McDonalds she'd still need to call the restaurant who had the order directly.
Personally, I would have called and griped on FB/Twitter. But I would have called.
Click me, click me!