The ever-wonderful Jackie Huba pointed me to this example of a company who understands the value of monitoring their brand on the web. Turns out Jacque Jo at girlofwords loves Micro Center but had a world-class crappy experience and blogged about it. She presented the good folks at Micro Center a gift and they graciously accepted. How? Ed Lukens, the company’s Marketing Communications Manager, within a day simply apologized to her via the comments on her blog. And then Jacque Jo responded with a terrific followup post. And there was Ed again thanking her for her kind words.
Business leaders…care to know what I did after reading this? I went to see where my nearest Micro Center is located (sadly, none in Austin). But I now know I can buy online from them and I’m inclined to make Micro Center my first stop when shopping for electronics.
All it took was a conscientious employee monitoring the discussions for their brand and rectifying any complaints with a swift apology. Easy, right? Then why don’t more businesses do this? Look at how something so simple as an apology can create passionate customers.
Kudos to you, Ed. I hope your management appreciates the work you’re doing.
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Thank you so much for featuring my post. I was amazingly pleased with their response to my experience and I'll be a lifelong MicroCenter customer because of it.
I think you're exactly right — monitoring the chatter helps greatly. This is the second time a company has responded because of a bad experience.
Thanks for the good work you do!
And thank you for the comment
I hope that your post provokes some reflection within Micro Center's business. The challenge for them will be to move to the next stage of the process: now they've apologize, will they take action to improve? Let's hope for Ed's sake that he's not issuing public apology #2 to you any time soon.