The story of Amy’s Baking Company Bakery Boutique, a restaurant located in Scottsdale, AZ, has taken the internet by storm and offers an excellent opportunity to reflect on behaviors that shouldn’t ever be a part of a company’s social media strategy. A short summary for anyone who hasn’t yet read about the incident:

The restaurant was recently featured on the season finale of Kitchen Nightmares, a show helmed by Gordon Ramsey. Controversy erupted after Ramsey declared the restaurant’s situation unfixable. According to the Daily Beast: “the couple was so difficult that even the typically hardened Ramsay decided he couldn’t help them and shut the show down before beginning the rehab phase.”

The collective internet responded in kind, bombarding the restaurant’s social media pages like Facebook and social commenting forums like Reddit with scathing comments about the establishment and its owners.

This is where the story devolves into every customer satisfaction pro’s nightmare. Instead of laying low and letting the excitement subside, the owners instead decided to take to their Facebook page and respond to the barrage of comments they were receiving, doing so in a less than polite way.

A quick excerpt (and yes they were writing exclusively in all caps): “TO REDDIT.  I FORBID YOU FROM SPREADING YOUR HATE ON THAT SITE.  THIS IS MY FACEBOOK, AND I AM NOT ALLOWING YOU TO USE MY COMPANY ON YOUR HATE FILLED PAGE.” This impassioned response only further fueled internet commenters’ fire, and the whole incident continued to devolve from there.

At the core of this story is a lesson on what not to do on social media as a company and a brand. Kelly Clay of Forbes writes an excellent piece summarizing the seven lessons you can take from this cringe-inducing story. Her seven tips? Per Clay, “don’t reply to everyone, don’t respond to trolls, don’t react right away, Reddit is not for the weak, don’t insult people, learn to walk away and don’t lie.”

Clay’s piece offers good lessons for even the most experienced marketers and highlights the importance of reading and responding to customer feedback in a levelheaded, calm and productive manner instead of following your social media whims wherever they happen to take you.

Potentially one of the most popular business mottos of all time, the idea that the ‘customer is always right’ was popularized by department store retailers like Harry Selfridge and Marshall Field around the turn of the 20^th century.  Since then, it has become a philosophy ingrained in our notion of customer service and satisfaction, but does this slogan hold true in any and all circumstances?

On his blog Value Creator Brian Vellmure considers this very question.  Often we categorize our interactions with clients as “customer relationships.”  Per Vellmure: “As in any relationship, sometimes there is a misalignment of expectations and a lack of compelling value proposition for both sides.”

Vellmure effectively points out that any relationship, even a business one, is not one-sided and it is very rare that any person or company is ALWAYS right. As with any relationship, customer interactions are give-and-take, and companies would do well to realize this.  For Vellmure, the old adage is inaccurate, and automatically adhering to it can have detrimental results.

Yes, a company’s first and foremost duty is to listen to and show empathy for their customer’s needs and requests, but this communication should be constructive and productive for both parties involved.

Vellmure puts this idea into context, stressing that companies have a goal to foster positive customer engagement and to emphasize “an endless and tireless pursuit to create value, to delight customers, and to create a community of engaged, happy and enthusiastic customers.”

The simple truth is that not every business will be a fit for every customer.  In Vellmure’s opinion, companies shouldn’t bend over backwards to please every customer 100% of the time, but rather cultivate mutually beneficial, profitable relationships that are a great fit for both client and service provider.

Ben Zifkin of Hubba stresses that employees understand their product and its potential in and out, in a different way than customers perceive it.  The end goal of any partnership is to effectively communicate the potential benefits partnership may offer in a way that customers understand, agree with and find appealing.

Zifkin offers a multi-level process for achieving this.  It starts with companies themselves drilling down to make sure they understand the fundamental problem at hand.  After they’ve accurately pinpointed the issue at the root of a customer’s complaint, they move on to identify and design a suitable solution that mitigates or fixes the problem.  Once both parties have agreed on the solution, execution commences.

Virtually every company, regardless of the industry in which they operate, aims to be customer-centric. Per Get Satisfaction: “Customer-centric companies have already discovered the wisdom of bringing the voice of their customers to the middle of product discussions, marketing messages and sales strategies.”

While it seems like stating the obvious, the influence of customers on the research and development process should not be underestimated.  In addition to manufacturing or producing high-quality, reasonably priced services and solutions, it is critical for companies to offer products that customers actually want to buy.

Creating appealing products and services should go hand-in-hand with distributing messaging that resonates with clients and giving them transparent access to content and support.  In this day and age, companies need to be prepared for and expect a ‘social customer’ that is engaged in the process and anticipates immediate and comprehensive access to information.

Get Satisfaction suggests cultivating socially engaged customer relationships by creating branded communities that “bring your customers together for online conversations about your products and services.”  Business communities make it easier for customers to connect with you and one another for maximum business value.

The company has produced a great infographic that breaks down the business value of customer communities by function.  The chart catalogues how this can be beneficial in terms of support, marketing and soliciting customer and product feedback.  The piece highlights a number of company goals and offers potential customer community solutions.

Having a thriving, active, engaged customer community increases company efficiency and reduces customer wait time.  Customers can connect with each other to potentially get solutions and advice via this type of peer-to-peer network, in effect shortening the support cycle.

Get Satisfaction expertly highlights real-world company success stories achieved as a result of implementing high-functioning customer communities.

Get tips, tricks and ideas from the piece here, and happy community building!

Companies are constantly researching and modifying their strategies for measuring customer satisfaction.  More of an art than a science, customer satisfaction sheds light on important components of a company’s sales and business strategy.  Studies have shown that a high rate of customer satisfaction often translates into a large loyalty percentage and to word-of-mouth recommendations.

An article on Business Insider details the strategy at Trada (a company that administers a PPC marketplace for agencies and advertisers to connect with PPC experts): a unique approach to gauging customer satisfaction.  “There’s a small smiley face in the nav bar.  It can exist in only one of four states – Happy, Meh, Unhappy or Confused.  It can only be set by the customer themselves and customers are regularly prompted to update its status.”

The face starts neutral, and there is no default face that prompts customers towards one sentiment over another.

The idea behind the widget is pretty ingenious.  The company selected four distinct, easy to depict emotions that run the gamut between happy to upset, and that includes the mehs and headscratchers in between.

This goes far in eliminating the confusion and potential misinterpretation that exists with number scales and open commenting forums.  One person’s five could be another person’s seven.  One person’s irate could be another person’s annoyed.  There is a lot of room for misinterpretation in those types of scales.

However, if someone self-identifies as unhappy through a frown face, it covers every possible emotional degree from the tamest (frustration) to the most extreme (rage) and all others in between and even those loosely related (sad, upset, disappointed, worried, agitated) emotions.

Only depicting four emotions may seem limiting, but it is actually the opposite.  Per the article: “it is easy enough to use that customers engage with it and it can only exist in a limited number of states so it gets rid of the gravitation away from the edge that larger measurement scales tend to produce.”

In other words, the measurement scale is so simple that it is highly effective in identifying those customers that need more high-touch service to generate a more satisfactory experience, and for those who are generally happy or neutral about their interactions.