If there are two things that I want people to know about me, one is that I am a very humble, modest guy that is not given to petty vanities. The other is that I have absolutely incredible teeth.
And, being of the toothily persuasion, I had my semi-annual checkup this morning. My dentist is brutally meticulous in his ways with the scraper, but is also a gregarious, talkative person. He always chats me up about my line of work in between breathless comments about the rhapsodical beauty of my lower bicuspids.
So naturally, he took an interest in all of the Social Media explorations that Gunn/Jerkens has been undertaking. He was excited because he had been getting new business thanks to customer reviews on Yelp.com, but in particular he wanted my opinion on the way that a traffic ticket-fighting service that he had recently used had been reaching out to him to post his feedback on third-party review sites.
It seems that he had used this online service to fight a couple of recent citations. His experience with them was positive–they had beaten one ticket and were working on the second. However, almost immediately he began to be inundated with emails from the service asking him–politely– to offer a testimonial. First one email, then another. And another. Each of them featuring links not just to the usual standbys like Yelp, but to intimidating-sounding places like the Better Business Bureau.
His beef was twofold: number one he was feeling a little pushed around. The company had the right idea to try to engage a happy customer, but they gradually crossed the boundary into outright spamming, thereby depersonalizing the valuable connection that they had created. Second–and this really bugged him–his other ticket hadn’t even been resolved yet, and they were already leaning on him for his testimonial.
His story was a great reminder of how we should be treating the people with whom we are hoping to build a community. In our zeal to create an open conversation, we have to be careful about needing too much from the customers that we’re trying to reach. Applying so much pressure to participate dilutes the voluntary aspect of sharing these personal experiences, which for many is the main appeal of joining the conversation in the first place.
Also, it was a reminder that customers email address can be a dangerous thing. There has to be better communication on the messenger’s side before they reach out to their customers. If the person programming the email list for the testimonial requests had run the name of my dentist by someone that was handling his cases, they might have learned that their company still had unfinished business with him. You never know how a customer will react, and in my dentist’s case, he found the timing of their requests to be just as offensive as the frequency of their pestering.
As I unclipped my sanitary bib and reached for my checkbook to pay, my dentist grabbed my hand and stopped me.
“Please,” he said, “the pleasure was mine. To clean your teeth…I feel like I’m on a restoration team at the Louvre. It makes me young again.”
“I get that a lot,” I said.
“Just do something for me,” he continued, clearly wounded by the memory of being wronged. “Tell them. Tell them my story. We’ve got to fix this Social Media thing.”
I’ll do what I can, my friend. I’ll do what I can.
