Edition 53 - Amy and Samy feel the heat in the kitchen - What are the customer service lessons?

Social Media Podcast

For some time now we have been planning to do a Social Media Podcast about the increasing importance of social media for customer service however, the recent incredible story of Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique and Bistro has prompted us to make the podcast now. We were alerted to the story on the evening that it started to unfold on Facebook by Meilee Anderson, a Social Media Podcast listener from Seattle - thank you Meilee for bringing this to our attention in the UK.

Because Meilee contacted us early on we were able to see much of the story unfold and when we first looked at the Facebook page it had around 1680 likes; we actually did a screen grab at 1802 likes and now, 48 hours later, the page has 62,067 likes. During the podcast recording earlier today the total went form around 48,000 to 50,109.

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Normally growth like this is good news but not for Amy and Samy, the owners of Amy's Baking Company Bakery Boutique and Bistro, this is a genuine kitchen disaster that even Gordon Ramsay couldn't have predicted. In fact, Gordon Ramsay was instrumental in flaming the fire that very quickly got out of control.

In the podcast we discuss this monumental kitchen nightmare and explore what went wrong, what is continuing to go wrong and whether the situation is in any way recoverable - listen to our opinion and feel free to leave your own comments here on the blog.

Having examined the issue, we then go on to explore the wider issue of customer service in a social media environment. We look at the sharp increase in customer service enquiries on social media platforms and the willingness of consumers to commit their enquiries, complaints, and compliment to public platforms.

Many organisations are not fully prepared for dealing with customer service issues on social media platforms; there is a tendency to leave it to the marketing team rather than hand it over the customer service experts. We discuss what should happen and what action organisations need to take if they are to successfully deal with customer service issues online.

Some of the things we discuss in this podcast include:
Amy's Baking Company Baker and Boutique
Velocity Digital - Mike McGrail's blog post on the Amy and Samy Facebook meltdown
Who should respond? - Marketing Department or Customer Service Department
The blurring lines between marketing and customer service
Virgin's recent Facebook problems
Why you should embrace negative comments
The Drum article about the cost of bad customer service
Zappos - An excellent model for online customer service; practicing what their core values preach
Humour - Can you defuse a situation with humour?