Today, Groupon offered a deal where customers pay $10 to get $20 worth of food at Nando’s Flame-Grilled Chicken. This deal was a bit more complicated than usual because it consisted of more restrictions in its fine print, including:
Limit 1 per person. Limit 1 per table. Limit 1 per visit. Valid only for location purchased.
However, this fine print wasn’t very clearly explained and there were a few customers that bought more than 1 Groupon (which is the limit in total per person, regardless of locations). “Chris V.” was one of them, and he wanted to clarify the deal by bringing it up on the deal’s discussion board. Below are screenshots of the conversation between Chris and a Groupon customer service representative, Kyle:
Now, you can tell Chris was starting to get frustrated.
…and so was Kyle.
Unfortunately, instead of taking Chris’ honest opinion and constructive criticism as a possibly loyal customer, Kyle seemed to have flipped out a little and showed a little bit of bad attitude. Kyle has basically violated many laws in listening and responding to customers online by:
- implying that the customer was wrong (denying that the Fine Print is not vague);
- making the customer sound stupid (mentioning the fact that if the deal was meant for more than one purchase they would have said that);
- refusing to listen to the customer (asking ‘What’s so confusing about “Limit 1 Per Person”?’);
- belittling the customer with a badly-intended rhetorical question “…does that mean you should be allowed to break the rules?”;
- demonstrating indifference and insensitivity toward the customer’s concern;
- giving an obviously insincere apology by saying “Sorry… but…”; and
- assuming the customer had nothing to lose since he would be able to get a refund anyway.
Of course, Chris was now even more angry.
To my surprise, Kyle seemed to have realized he had probably gone too far; he ended the conversation on a positive but awkward note by blatantly saying something that made him appear to have acknowledged Chris’ points, once again extremely insincerely.
Kyle didn’t even thank Chris for his feedback!
This is the first time that I’ve seen a Groupon representative handle the complaint so unprofessionally. Kyle is probably a new staff member or was just having a bad day. Either way, Kyle should have either taken the conversation offline and dealt with the customer directly (instead of posting on the discussion forum), or at least followed the Social Media Response Model,where Chris would be categorized as a “misguided” customer, and proceeded to fix the facts accordingly–with a positive attitude all the way. It would have helped if Kyle could have at least mentioned something along the lines of “Groupon will look into this technical issue and work on improving it…”