What Should Companies Do?

It is funny that you should mention McDonald’s. I recently used them as an example for a case studies presentation. The McDonald’s website is very impressive, but we had to ask ourselves who it was really targeting? Obviously, it was created for the media, investors and customers. They put forth a great deal of effort. However, the employee relations section did not seem very genuine. McDonald’s may just be a good example of a company that implements the right strategy without the necessary comprehension of the problem.

As for not responding to McChronicles, McDonald’s needs to understand that they are only hurting their other campaigns by choosing to ignore this particular one. No one can afford to be selective about their audience. Even if they can afford it, they won’t benefit from it.

Engaging a blogger is not always the best tactic, but if McDonald’s were to provide a substantial response, people will recognize it. We are always advised to read blog posts with a discretionary eye. A response would allow viewers to receive the correct information and not left to make their own conclusions.

Their policy should be every customer a satisfied customer. My policy is if i buy something for a few thousand dollars it better damned well work and if it doesn’t I want my money back. Has nothing to do with blogging or preferential treatment. It really is just about plain, old customer service. And if you lose sight of that, you’re lost.

You asked for it, so here’s my plan:

McDonalds SHOULD have a company-operated blog. It should have someone in the position to monitor what those in the blogosphere are saying about the company. BUT, it needs to go one step further… the McDonalds spokesperson (who makes it absolutely clear that he is working for and representing the views of the organization) needs to comment in outside blogs and invite comments on the corporate blog (basically use the medium as it was created for!).

Josh poses the problem of addressing customer issues and the slippery slope of trying to appease these complainers. Yes, this can be a catch 22, but it doesn’t have to be. My idea for a McDonalds blog complaint policy is DONT GIVE THEM FREE STUFF. If McDonalds tried to stop negativity by just shoving product at them, of course other bloggers would cry out for their free product.

For McDonalds to respond to negative customer experiences they need to do it with words alone. For example, instead of offering free meals or another form of atonement, the McDonalds company blog could apologize for a bad experience and communicate what the company has in place to rectify the situation. Address the exact problem, acknowledge their concerns, but offer a solution that can translate to other customers without bribing them with french fries. Bring disgruntled customers into the process, they will feel like part of the solution.

Corporate blogs offer an organization the means to communicate person to person with its customers - both good and bad. James Cash Penney said, “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” McDonalds needs to treat each blogger as an opportunity, not as a problem. The strength of the media to reach both opinion leaders and average customers far outweighs the risks.

I think companies should not be afraid to respond to their consumers. Just saying that they monitor the blogs, and knowing that they just don’t respond, doesn’t make customers feel very good. “I read it, but didn’t do anything about it” doesn’t cut it. A simple click on the comment button usually does the trick. Sometimes just knowing that someone has heard your problems makes people feel better.

I think the deciding factor about whether the customer is actually satisfied with the reply is sincerity. Lacking sincerity does nothing but fuel an already peeved customer’s fire. With out this, a company’s reply is useless.

When the person, who is supposed to be helping you, sounds like they are reading from a script, or giving you the brush off, there is nothing more aggravating. There is no service in that version of customer service. Nobody who has spent their time and money into buying a product wants the company to turn around only to treat you like you don’t matter. I think replying to these posts would be treating the customer like an actual human being instead of a buying machine.

On the other hand I don’t believe that all posts have to be answered either. Too much time and money would be spent doing that. You can’t make everyone happy and some people will never be satisfied. But knowing that a company made even a little effort to show they care about the happiness of the consumer goes along way.

I think it’s important to acknowledge customers’ needs, wants and concerns. There has to be a happy medium when responding to customers, but how you find that medium is the hard part. It would be impossible to reply to every blog and address every concern. Giving away free things to shut up the complaining customer solves nothing. Listening, caring, responding and making a customer feel like their opinion matters is how you keep them coming back.

Blogs could be a good way of keeping McDonalds and other companies up-to-date on how customers are feeling and what their concerns are. The main concern is how the company will handle the blogs. It really is aggravating when you have an issue with a company and they ignore you. It is even more frustrating when they acknowledge you, but treat you as if you don’t matter or they don’t have time for you. Understanding customer service and treating people equally, rather than as a simple customer with an issue, is important.

Dale Wolf has a great post on customers and how your actions as a company speak louder than words. He said, “We need to see customers as people with real needs and interests that will, ultimately, lead to a stronger relationship. Listen and respond.” Dale also said that execs see customers as numbers on a spreadsheet. If this is the case, then companies like McDonald’s need to put more effort into making the customer happy.

I think there are two parts to an issue like this: (1) engage in dialog and (2) follow through.

Engage in dialog
I agree with Erin M.’s plan for how McDonald’s needs to handle the blogging situation, and I think that idea can apply to most companies. It’s important to open things up for discussion — both to get valuable feedback AND to show that the company is actively committed to communicating with customers and improving its service/products. Freebies solve nothing and seem like a trivial “quick fix” to me. I feel like every time I turn around I’m saying or thinking this, but honest, respectful, sincere and gracious communication is key when dealing with the blogesphere.

Follow Through
Of course, all that good communicating doesn’t do a bit of good if the company doesn’t follow through. Customers aren’t stupid and they’ll catch on pretty darn fast if a company is making a superficial blogging effort. There are two things customers hate worse than bad service: companies pretending they’re doing something about their bad service and/or companies pretending their bad service is wonderful. With the Dell Hell case, for example, a company cannot claim to be known for its outstanding customer service, produce a crappy product, and then follow that with equally crappy service. Not only does that not cut it — that infuriates the customer! Rightly so.

The moral of the story: engage in dialog with customers. There’s a lot that can be learned from that. BUT never, in the blogesphere or elsewhere, make claims or statements and refuse to follow through.

Customers have to trust the companies they interact with. I also think that it is the companies’ responsibility to be give customers the attention they need and deserve. With the McDonalds situation, it doesn’t matter if they work with billions of customers, each one of those should be important to McDonalds. If it is necessary to hire mor people to make sure each customer gets paid attention to, than that is something that needs to be done.

I have to agree with Jami when she says, “As for not responding to McChronicles, McDonald’s needs to understand that they are only hurting their other campaigns by choosing to ignore this particular one. No one can afford to be selective about their audience. Even if they can afford it, they won’t benefit from it.” This is so true, and if McDonald’s doesn’t realize this, I believe they will, at some point, begin to suffer.

It is important for huge companies to realize that each customer still expects some sort of respect. In fact, the more well known a company is, the more expectations people are going to have. That’s a key elemenet to what makes a company so successful.

I was in class when Jami presented McDonalds as an example of employee relations so I also have already thought about who McDonalds is really targeting in ads or through its website. I think it is funny that no one has contacted McC from the corporation. It seems as if the people of McDonalds know that even if they don’t contact McC, it will make little or no difference on their sales because it is such a big company.

I do agree thought that eventually this will catch up with McDonalds. If they continue to be selective of the audience they choose to target, people will start to notice. Instead of billions of hamburgers sold, it will be billions of people ignored. It is important for companies to treat customers individually.

Leigh Ann quoted Dale Wolf well. He said, “We need to see customers as people with real needs and interests that will, ultimately, lead to a stronger relationship. Listen and respond.” Executives should embrace the chance to interact with a passionate consumer, rather than ignore it. Consumers know that someone is checking out the blog and actively not responding and it makes it even worse. This should be a chance for a giant company to show that it cares about the customer and wants to respond to opinions and wants rather than pretending not to notice.

McDonalds could use a blog like other corporations to actively solve problems and voice what it is doing about it. Blogging can be used to reach out to the consumer and show that if there is a problem McDonalds will show that it has the ability to care, not just to give out a coupon for a free hamburger.

I agree with you, bloggers can get corporations into very sticky situations. I think that the best way I would face the problem would be to constantly monitor the site. As long as there is no privacy line in a contract, the blogger does have the right to free speech. Through monitoring the site, I would pick and choose what to reply to. If the blogger posts a bunch of fallacies, I would post and state companies position toward the allegations. Then, I would site factual information to back my statements up.

Bloggers like Jeff Jarvis can be so dangerous because of their capacity to “rally the troops.” Suddenly, everyone who has had a problem with the corporation in the past will alliance and start to cause problems for the company. In Dell’s case, I too had been experiencing problems with Dell’s customer service around the same time that Jeff Jarvis wrote his blog. This enraged me further and I am still not sure if I will ever buy a Dell computer again. For this reason, I think that it is important for companies to have a person dedicated to searching internet sites for public opinion. People are blogging at every hour of the day, and the companies need to know what people are saying about them.

No, I do not think it is necessary to reply to every single negative post written about your company. However, when a central complaint (like customer service) is circulating around blog sites, your company needs to take action. Although blogs may pose as a threat to companies, they are truly a great way of measuring your relations with your publics.

You brought up a very good point. It is indeed a difficult situation and one every company should consider. Should they and even can they monitor every corporate and personal blog to find customer gripes about their product? When they find the complaints do they honor them or stay quiet? There is not one specific answer for this problem.

I believe every company should monitor corporate and personal blogs. Companies should regard such blogs as vital customer feedback. If the company finds a complaint sufficient enough to respond, they should definitely follow up. How should they gauge what complaints are sufficient enough to respond to is another situation in itself. I believe the companies should respond if they believe the statement or complaint about their product could possibly harm their business. If in not responding, the company would lose only one customer rather than respoding and losing hundreds or the problem could disappear entirely, they should stay quite.

This is an extremely difficult situation and there is not a set guideline to avoiding it, however, it is something very important that every company must consider.

If I was put in this situation I would respond to McChronicles, at least by now. I think it is important to strive to satisfy every customer. It is true to note that you are not going to make every customer or person happy though. I think it would definitely be important to recognize that there should be at communication between complaining and complimenting customers. I think that at least if a blogger can get their word heard and recognized that it might release at least some satisfaction. I understand also that it might be hard to answer everyone’s comments or complaints but I think the effort and eventually the response will at least give the customer some satisfying recognition.

I was not able to hear Jami’s analysis of McDonald’s publics but I would assume that there are quite a few to count. I think that it is important if they desire good relations with their multiple publics that they would try to reach all of them in some way. They might not be targeting certain publics at the same time, but they should have a plan to reach all at some point. I think a blog would be essential to this purpose and to the purpose of communicating with their customers. I definitely think any blog should be monitored too.

I think it would be a good idea if McDonalds evaluated what is important to their customers and how important is it to the people behind McDonald’s that these customers are not satisfied. I agree that giving away free ideas will not help this situation. The customer will continue to feel the way they do and nothing else will be done further to satisfy the customer either. I see it everyday when I am serving at Applebees, giving away free stuff only leads some customers to want to complain every time they go somewhere to eat because they think they deserve free food. Now, in this case there are many different reasons why a customer would get free food because I’m not saying one if more sufficient than the other but it is just the fact that some people feel they are owed something free. I think the situation depends entirely on what the product or service is and how substantial and important is it that this customer is going to be happy in the end.

I am surprised McDonalds didn’t respond McChronicles. You would think that their PR department would want to clear up any discrepancy or error in their part up. The best action to take would be to take responsibility and then make the customer feel like you care. Then they should take the right steps to prevent this from happening again.

I huge step for McDonalds would be for them to create a blog, which I know is risky but it would have to be heavily monitored. The blog would allow customers to comment and tell their complaints or praises about the company. Any inappropriate comments would not be allowed to post but the blog manager would send a massage in respond to the send and try to make amends.

McDonalds also needs to become more aware of their customers wants and needs. They may have a million customers but over time that could diminish if they do not have happy customers. They could talk to their customers on site or though surveys. They have such a broad range of customers. Then they need to get a feel of each demographic and what would make each of them feel an important part of the McDonalds family.

After they learn more about their customers then they need to take action. In doing this they will have a lot fewer unhappy customers and a lot more happy ones

In my opinion both Dell and McDonald’s should use their blogs to their advantage. When there is a complaint, act quickly to clear it up, don’t ignore it. In my opinion the worst thing that can possibly be done is to ignore the problem.

It’s like when you get a snag in your pantyhose, if you don’t do something about it right then before someone notices it, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger and turn into a big ugly mess that everyone will notice.

In PR the most important things to remember are to be proactive and when something negative does inevitably happen.. Act Quickly to Resolve it.

Blogging will allow for customers to voice their opinions more easily, (both complains and praises.) So, if there is a problem with a product or service immediately fix it. .. And if there is a crazy nut that is slandering the organization immediately take care of that.

I also think that it’s important to remember that people want to know that their opinion matters and that someone it listening. I think that as long as the organization is operating to the highest degree of satisfaction that regularly interacting with the organization’s publics can only postively affect and improve it.