When Are You A Social Liability?
While staying at the Ocean Edge Resort on Cape Cod last year we had a less than desirable experience. It was a comedy of errors from the moment we arrived. They booked us into the same room as some family before us, we used our room key and walked in on an entire family staring wide-eyed and terrified. We sat with our bags in the parking lot waiting for someone to rectify the problem, and then the room we were put inyo had a ton of aesthetic problems (missing tiles, hairs in bathroom, etc, etc.) but we're not that picky and we were tired so whatever. Then for 3 days in a row room service would not leave anything but decaf coffee, I'd call every night and they'd have to send someone out in a golf cart to bring it and promise that the next day it would be delivered correctly. A small thing (well, ok, my morning coffee is not a small thing) but how difficult can it be to remember to replace coffee like you do in every room every day?
I've stayed there in the past, generally bringing a group, and it has always been a pleasure. So I was aware this wasn't the "norm" for the resort. After I checked out I saw the manager standing there and I pulled him aside and quietly mentioned some of the issues.
He showed concern, wished he'd known about it earlier, and gave me his business card and asked that I please contact him this year when we returned so that he could "make it right". Naturally I proceeded to lose the business card over time, but never fear, the internet is my friend right? I could pick up the phone and try and explain all this, but me being me, I decided to turn this into a sort of experiment. I wanted to understand how connected a hotels digital presence might be with its real world day to day operations.
To that end I found that their website had a contact form on it, and I used it to describe the above scenario and how I wished to stay there on one particular upcoming night. 24 hours pass with no response. Then 48. Then 72. You get the picture. I contact several other hotels and ask them what their normal turnaround is on responding to requests that come in via their website. They all say within 24 hours with the intent to be much quicker than that. I can't say whether they live up to that, only that that's what they say. So then I proceed to leave another request on their website form, but this time as an alter-ego (Leroy Stick, some of you will get that joke). I asked about availability of a couple of rooms that might be close to one another for the same night that I had previously requested. Then I contacted their twitter account @oceanedgeresort to ask what the normal turnaround is on a website request. I didn't get an answer from twitter on the turnaround time question, but I did (surprise!) get a response back to my second web request in a couple of days. Actually, I received *three* responses to my generic question over the course of *five* days, from *three* different people. No, I'm not kidding.
I never did get a response back to the original request though, not one. But we did go to the resort as planned, and we did stay on the night that I mentioned in my request. The visit went fine, no issues. I've been back from vacation a couple of weeks now, and I just got a response a *month* later from @oceanedgeresort twitter account containing the words "24 hours"....in regards to how quickly they turnaround web requests (apparently twitter responses are much, much longer). But let's examine what has occurred here:
- When putting in a web request that required someone to actually go through a process of actions (forward to manager to confirm what I was saying, manager responds to that person with a directive, then that person responds to me) absolutely nothing occurs. Was it forwarded? Was it assumed I was some guy trying to get a free nights stay and tossed into the trash? Was it sent to the manager and the manager decided not to respond? Who knows. What I do know is that I went from a feeling of "here's a place which tries to rectify problems and 'make it right'" to "here's a place which makes promises of 'making it right' but doesn't deliver. I'm guessing that's not the feeling they want me to have, but there you have it.
- When putting in a web request that simply required pulling up availability and giving a response it took a couple of days but I got my answer...three times. This of course left an even worse taste in my mouth because now I know for sure that someone *is* reading these requests and that someone made a conscious decision not to respond to my first one. And also that they obviously have no internal method for keeping track of whether or not they have responded to a web request yet, much less what they said in the response.
- When I actually showed up to stay there, I did so under the same name I left the original request under and on the same date requested, and the same name that I stayed under last year when all of the problems occurred. Yet there was no acknowledgement of the fact that they knew me, or of any prior issues. So now I can assume that either nothing was put under my customer record last year about the issues, and that when i sent the original web request it was not matched up to my customer record so that a note could be made...or...there were notes and they were simply ignored. In either case, that sour taste in my mouth has now turned to bile.
I've drawn this story out a bit so that you had a feel for the evolution of the emotions involved and how each step contributes to changing the brand perception. Here is a high-end resort that I've always loved, that tends to do a good job, and that even after a disastrous stay had accomplished leaving me with a positive feeling about them and an intent to return. And in one fell swoop their digital presence completely wiped that away. I naturally could have picked up the phone, or had a direct conversation with someone when I arrived in person, but that would spoil the test and give me nothing to write about now wouldn't it?
While the above is all true, and is what instigated this article, the reality is this isn't a rarity and certainly not limited to Ocean Edge Resort. It's happening every day in social media and particularly with organizations which one would think are geared towards hospitality and customer service. This story is simply to demonstrate that you *have* to understand the risks you undertake if you simply want to *say* that you are engaged in digital media vs. actually *being* in digital media.
Putting a form on a web page creates a specific expectation. Establishing a Twitter or Facebook account creates a specific expectation. If you aren't prepared to deliver on those expectations then you are better off not being there at all.
Matt Ridings - @techguerilla
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