reputation both online and off can affect your sales considerably.
In the past if you ran a business and did the wrong thing by your customer word of mouth would only go as far as
your friends and family and you would usually go elsewhere for your product or service.
Now getting a bad online reputation can just about close a business down.
Managing your online reputation is something i will talk about in another later post.
Recently on one of my rare half days off i took my lawnmower to a store to try and get it fixed.
Upon entering the store i was asked by the gentlemen if he could help.
So i explained that our lawn mower which was about 4 years old would not start and that i had changed the spark plug but that there seemed to be no spark.
I told him the brand and he said that they dont fix them and as i was about to say thank you and walk away this guy who i found out later was the owner started ranting and yelling
I want to take your money.I dont want you to walk out of here
Three times he yelled this out and twice i told him to calm down
and stop yelling at me and that it was only a lawn mower and i did not really matter and that i will probably buy a new mower.
then he proceeded to try and sell me a mower and i said that i was not interested.
while all of this was going on i was feeling quite gutted and very insulted that i was being yelled at and i could not
work out what this mans problem was.
My wife who was in the car could see what was going on and wondered WTF and as i walked out he shook his head at me so my wife told me later.
Recently i did some research on this business and found that most people in that trade did not like dealing with this man.
I contacted 3 people about the business and :
1/ contractor said that he did not like to deal with people who walk in off the street and liked to deal only with trade contractors.this contractor said he disliked the man and only bought from this business as it was the closest to his work
2/Another contractor said he thought this man was a psychopath and he refused to deal with him and was full of praise for the other staff that worked there.
3/Another contractor had his equipment stolen and the owner replaced it and told the contractor to pay for it later.
So different conflicting opinions on this man but if you looked online there were a few complaints about the lack of
customer service usually referring to the owner in question.
I have talked about this to a lot of people and most could not believe what happened to me.
Now i deal with a lot of businesses but i felt like i had been emotionally gutted
My dilemma was should i go online and tell people about this man or not.
I did not put an online review about this man and business as he had good workers who may have been affected
and possibly lost their jobs as a result of bad online reviews.
This shows that some people in should not be in business if they do not like dealing with others in a respectful way.
What do you think.what would you have done after this