Just a quick note in customer service failure, from a company I'd never have expected it from. As anyone who lives in New York City can attest to, owning and/or driving a car just isn't a good idea or feasible from a cost-perspective. So when city dwellers travel, we take trains, planes and buses. It's just normal.
This past weekend, I had to travel from New York to Philadelphia, and the cheapest travel option by far was to take Boltbus. Now a bit of background: I've been a valuable customer of Boltbus since the company's inception in 2008 (back when they promoted their $1 fares, which are now next to impossible to attain), traveling within their Northeast corridor stops nearly 20 times. I've recently used their major competitor Megabus, who I was very impressed with. Anyhow, I digress.
The bus I was on, leaving at 9:30am on Saturday from NYC, was scheduled to arrive in Philadelphia at 11:40am. The bus was early, it wasn't full and all was fine....until we got on the road. After entering New Jersey, we hit some major stop-and-go traffic on the NJ Turnpike (quick aside: I've never not seen major traffic in New Jersey, where they always seem to be working on the highways). Rather than waiting it out in the traffic, our driver decided to get off the highway, and to take an alternate route (or so I thought). She ended up driving about 40 minutes on small side roads, only to end up in Staten Island. Yes, after over an hour on the road, we were back in New York state (which isn't the right way to Philadelphia, for anyone who has driven this corridor can attest to). Apparently realizing she was lost, she turned around and backtracked all the way to the same exact highway stop we had gotten off at over an hour ago, all the while speaking on the phone to someone trying to get directions. We were 1 hour, 30 minutes into our trip and were a grand total of 5 miles from New York City. Bus passengers were clearly grubmling with disgust and impatience, but at that point there isn't much you can do. We ended up arriving in Philadelphia at 1:40pm, nearly two hours after scheduled, and all because of driver error.
I started tweeting about our issues to @Boltbus (the company's Twitter channel) and sent off an email to their customer service support, just letting them know that perhaps they should equip their buses with GPS devices for drivers who are feeling adventurous when it comes to directions.
Fast forward to Monday morning (nearly 48 hours after this debacle), and I haven't gotten as much as a Twitter message, email or anything back from the company. For an organization who prides themselves on technology (that's where you book the tickets, you show your mobile phone's boarding pass, etc.), I think at least a response would have been warranted.
So my question is this: how would your company have handled a situation like this with unhappy customers? How often do you monitor your social media mentions and presence?
I'd recommend checking out a great post on this topic last week from SCRM expert Maria Onegva (@themaria) on how to successfully monitor social media channels at http://mashable.com/2010/08/02/successful-social-media-monitoring/.