I received this email from Bob, a reader who first visited ishopandtell.com after hearing me on the St. John’s Morning Show:
“It struck me that there are two sides to every story and I wonder if advancement towards your goal which, I assume, is to reduce poor customer service by exposing it rather than just to rant, would be better served by affording the business involved the opportunity to respond to your postings before you make them. You could prepare your post, e-mail it to the affected business and give them say, three business days to respond. Then you would publish your entry and their response or, in the event that they have not responded, state that they had been given the chance to respond and have chosen not to do so.
Something to consider, perhaps.”
I felt that I should respond publicly to this one in addition to the email that I sent to Bob, because I’m sure that there are other readers who might be thinking the same thing. While I’m definitely interested in hearing what the companies themselves have to say, I feel that if companies are concerned about their customer service image, new media such as my blog, Twitter, and Facebook will certainly be on their radar.
My blog and profiles are all public and I treat submissions from businesses in the same manner in which I treat customer submissions.
It’s interesting that this email came in just a few days before I found this article on mashable.com about the changing face of news, referred to as “social news” therein. I think that if you substitute the word “information” for “news” in the following excerpt, the statement remains valid:
“Social media has fundamentally changed our relationship to news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, share news, react to news–news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse.”
And essentially, what I’m providing on this blog is information about customer service here in our beautiful (albeit miserably overcast today) province.
I hope this clarifies a little about what role companies are welcome to play in our discussion here on ishopandtell.com as well as at twitter.com/ShopAndTellNL. If you know of a business that might wish to respond to any of the stories posted here, please encourage them to engage, share and react! The only thing I ask is that they identify themselves as a representative of the company on whose behalf they are contributing.
“It struck me that there are two sides to every story and I wonder if advancement towards your goal which, I assume, is to reduce poor customer service by exposing it rather than just to rant, would be better served by affording the business involved the opportunity to respond to your postings before you make them. You could prepare your post, e-mail it to the affected business and give them say, three business days to respond. Then you would publish your entry and their response or, in the event that they have not responded, state that they had been given the chance to respond and have chosen not to do so.
Something to consider, perhaps.”
I felt that I should respond publicly to this one in addition to the email that I sent to Bob, because I’m sure that there are other readers who might be thinking the same thing. While I’m definitely interested in hearing what the companies themselves have to say, I feel that if companies are concerned about their customer service image, new media such as my blog, Twitter, and Facebook will certainly be on their radar.
My blog and profiles are all public and I treat submissions from businesses in the same manner in which I treat customer submissions.
It’s interesting that this email came in just a few days before I found this article on mashable.com about the changing face of news, referred to as “social news” therein. I think that if you substitute the word “information” for “news” in the following excerpt, the statement remains valid:
“Social media has fundamentally changed our relationship to news. It’s no longer something we passively take in. We now engage with news, share news, react to news–news has become something around which we gather, connect, and converse.”
And essentially, what I’m providing on this blog is information about customer service here in our beautiful (albeit miserably overcast today) province.
I hope this clarifies a little about what role companies are welcome to play in our discussion here on ishopandtell.com as well as at twitter.com/ShopAndTellNL. If you know of a business that might wish to respond to any of the stories posted here, please encourage them to engage, share and react! The only thing I ask is that they identify themselves as a representative of the company on whose behalf they are contributing.
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