From September 2006 until
December 2011, I worked for a company that did market research. Specifically the company worked in
entertainment, mostly movie trailers.
The biggest thing we did was intercept work – we had crews in movie
theaters and malls across the nation stopping people who we then tried to fit
into our quota. If they fit in the quota
then we would show them trailers for previously unreleased movies, get their
opinions on what they liked and didn’t like and then, after companywide quota
had been met, we would send that information back to whatever movie studio had
booked the work. They would then recut
the movie trailer based on that information and that is what you see on tv and
in movie theaters. Sounds fun,
right? It was an absolute BLAST. Except when you are trying to
communicate.
In my opinion, there isn’t a
person alive who hasn’t had
difficulties communicating with a business.
Whether that difficulty is in the mode
of communication or in the people
doing the communicating, it’s still there.
How many people get irritated when they pick up the phone and speak to
someone with a thick accent that they simply cannot understand? It doesn’t take the support person saying
more than “hi” and a lot of people are already irritated and assume they will
not be able to understand. I think in a
lot of ways, social media could alleviate those pains.
Recently, I had an issue with
Amazon Textbooks. I had returned a book
but they had no record of it. Amazon has
a nifty chat feature that made resolving the issue so much easier. With two small children, my (quiet) phone
time is limited so using the chat was infinitely better. When the phone did ring and I spoke to the
Amazon support staff member, he had a very thick dialect that was a bit
difficult to understand. We did not have
that hurdle when in the chat window.
I’m sure you’ve seen the many
viral Facebook posts about who did what at Walmart or Target and the response
that they’ve received. There have been
more than one case of some business firing employees over something posted on
Facebook. The most recent thing I saw on
Facebook was a group of employees quitting the shoe store Journeys during a
back to school sale because of the manager.
I’ve liked the pages of several businesses and communicate through their
Facebook page and it really does make it a lot easier. You know they check their Facebook pages
regularly.
In my opinion it is the
people who make communication positive or negative, not the medium.
