[Update 2/15/12: Morton's social team just provided a reasonable response to our customer common. While it would have been better if the response was addressed to the customer instead of us, we are pleased to relay it]
It’s Valentine’s season and a great opportunity for fine dining restaurants to create memories and traditions by serving up great experiences to new and returning guests. But it’s also a hectic time for restaurants that must deal with capacity crowds and elevated expectations while all the while preserving a romantic, unhurried atmosphere.
Let’s take a look at Morton’s The Steakhouse and how they handled a Valentine’s memory that one guest and his date would rather forget. It’s our policy to keep the details of a complaint private, so instead we’ll focus on Morton’s handling of the issue. We should also note that this customer opted to use Mifft Mobile Feedback which delivers the feedback privately to a business’ management. It’s not clear why the consumer chose to engage a 3rd party rather than provide the feedback directly, but we suspect it’s because he felt he wasn’t heard when he tried speaking for himself at the restaurant. So, enter Mifft, as his advocate, as well as an advocate for Mortons. The goal is to craft a response that shifts the customer’s sentiment away from the intensely negative feelings he currently harbors about the brand.
Mifft began the process by attempting to contact Morton’s corporate office. The number on their website led to an automated system that required knowing someone’s name or extension or leaving a message in the operator’s mailbox. Already it’s easy to see why a consumer would prefer to engage a 3rd party rather than go through this themselves!
Next Mifft filled out the contact form on the website, listing Mifft’s contact info, not the consumer’s. The consumer’s detailed feedback was pasted into the form along with a convenient link for Morton staff to use to provide a response. Another task from which the consumer was spared. We call consumer-unfriendly phone systems and web forms “barriers to listening,” because they seem to deter the easy reception of feedback. It’s no wonder that the public embraced Twitter as a method for communicating with businesses–it’s a consumer-oriented feedback system as opposed to the business-oriented systems of telephone response centers and web forms. We believe Mifft’s personal delivery of feedback attempts to keep the consumer in the center of the process while acknowledging the business’ need to inject less-than-friendly feedback handling systems.
Mifft also contacted Morton’s social media team via Facebook and Twitter. The Morton team was very responsive initially, but they seemed to want to drive the consumer back to the web form which Mifft had already filled out on their behalf. More than once Mifft provided the Morton team with the case reference number issued by the website. Unfortunately, after two days without actually providing a response to the consumer, the Mifft team began to worry that Morton would forgo the opportunity to save their customer. We estimate that it took them at least 30 man-minutes to decide NOT to provide a response that would have taken 2-3 minutes. Or worse, they didn’t even decide, they just didn’t do anything.
The next approach Mifft tried was to call the restaurant directly. The Mifft team was able to speak to the general manager who initially balked when Mifft declined to provide the consumer’s last name. It’s up to the consumer to decide how much identifiable information to provide, isn’t it? The GM then hastily volunteered how he couldn’t do anything unless he had a last name, receipt, proof of payment or something to indicate that the customer was real. We heard a lot of negativity and push back and we hadn’t even gotten to the important part yet. Mifft replied that we understood his concerns, but wouldn’t he like to at least hear the feedback before coming up with reasons not to?
This part of the story reminds us of the Whataburger episode where their corporate consumer relations call center refused to even hear the feedback because it was coming from a 3rd party. Consumer relations professionals know that business intelligence recognizes that it must listen to the voice of the customer in whatever form it chooses to take. If it wasn’t for this sort of nimbleness, business’ would otherwise pay a hefty price for disregarding all the feedack delivered anonymously by Twitter and Yelp. We understand that it’s easy for a GM to temporarily lose sight of customer service, especially when seemingly under a virtual assault of feedback from many questionable sources. The key is to listen, then decide. Not decide not to listen.
With a little prompting, we encouraged the Morton’s GM to listen to the feedback. We were a little bit disappointed with his defensiveness and can understand why the consumer might also be disappointed by the defensiveness coming from the person empowered to be the steward of their experience. He said that it sounded like the meal was already comp’d on-site and so there was nothing more that he could do. We encouraged him to recognize that this customer and his date were still apparently disappointed with their experience. A gentle reminder that oftentimes, it’s not just about the money. It’s about the emotion, the wrecked expectations, the desired experience unfulfilled. Perhaps it would be sympathetic to genuinely acknowledge the consumer’s feelings and disappointment? We suspect that this GM and probably the social media team were overly concerned with whether the feedback and the consumer were real than actually addressing the feedback that was being delivered by the very human staff at Mifft. Would they have preferred to deal with the un-real feedback that gets delivered by the more public alternatives? It seems to us the risks are great when you alienate your unhappy customers who reach out to you. The point is that they tried to communicate with you. When you mishandle these opportunities, you could lose them and some of their friends for years or even the rest of their lives. How does this weigh against the risks of providing a response to a fake customer?
It remains to be seen if the Morton’s GM will save the business of this unhappy couple whose romantic evening was a huge disappointment. We’re eager to see if Morton’s reputation for fine dining extends to addressing dining experiences that ended up not being so fine.
The Mifft Team
