Holly crap. You guys are so out of control and so mixed up in all this.
Listen ---
Mike -
but I don't think you have any understanding of the realities of the situation in which Egyptian dive centres are finding themselves at the moment. I work for one of the biggest, and we have taking a beating over the last year, especially over the winter months - everybody has. The biggest names in Sharm are struggling to find customers, and when they do turn up, are struggling to find staff to cater to them, because there has been a mass exodus of dive staff - both foreign and Egyptian, since the January revolution last year.
It makes no difference how bad business is, it's not permission to be a jerk.
I work in the construction industry. The
NUMBER 1 most hardest hit industry in the US recession. No sector has lost more jobs, seen a larger reduction in work available. Combine that with illegals, scabs and fly-by-nights working for free, we've seen wages rolled back to 1980 levels. 1 out of 3 contracting businesses have closed.
Now with that said. It's doesn't give me permission to be a jerk because the situation I work in isn't farting gold coins through silk. So whatever struggles diving is going through have no relevance or justification to treat customers badly. IF ANYTHING, if you want to succeed in a down market you do the
opposite. You go in the opposite direction and
you create the best customer service you can. Even as bad as the industry is that I work in, we've grown every year, because we understand how to treat customers and potential customers. So stop rationalizing that a bad business situation gives you permission to be a bad business.
Let me ask you -- if every customer is precious in Egypt, when is this manager going to start acting like it? Why did this manager destroy his chances of getting a paying customer with the way he acted to this prospect??????? Because he was at a birthday party and the moron answers his own phone and is upset it's a customer?????
The answer is simple - he's a bad manager. But, you all keep denying it. Keep going down the path he was wronged.
The idea of hiring a lawyer and a service provider to deal with problems such as this is, in the current climate, ludicrous. It's pretty much all we can do to keep ourselves in business at the moment, without spending money on people who would charge more for a day's work than we pay our entire staff.
It was NEVER suggested even remotely to hire a lawyer. Read it again. I said if MY situation was as was being described by Devondiver as being attacked and slandered in the highly dramatic description he used, I would handle it as was written, I never said a word about some po dunk dive shop should lawyer up over a trip advisor review.
It's easy to look at this from the comfort of an corporate office somewhere, but here on the ground the situation is far more tenuous. For an outfit the size of Red Sea Relax, the loss of a handful of customers could actually ruin the livelihoods of every employee of that dive centre, because there is very little alternative employment available. It's not - as you assert, "wildly dramatic".
First off I don't work in a corporate office, I work 70-80 hours a week in a small business. Secondly, if customer acquisition is such an issue, maybe all the more reason to have a manager at a dive center who actually
likes people and
likes his job and realizes the situation and maybe he can figure out how to use voice mail or treat a potential customer with respect to EARN his business. IF NOT --- There's always trip advisor for a disgruntled potential customer to tell his story on. He can fight it all he wants, but the reality is, that this is the reality today.
Telling DevonDiver, an experienced, working tec instructor that "I don't think you actually deal with anything that you posted, and I think all your statements are based more academically than based on reality." is, in itself, ridiculous. Our whole lives revolve around customer service, and I can assure you, if you've been in the dive business for even just a couple of months, you've had to deal with angry customers and negative reviews - please go and read my blog post about the guy who thought we were ripping him off by charging him for 13 dives when he insisted he only made 10 - despite recording 13 dives in his own logbook! If Paul was such a poor manager, then he wouldn't have a job in the first place, and Red Sea Relax would have gone out of business long ago. In the current climate, the simple fact of continued existence means that the dive centre does, indeed, provide a high level of customer satisfaction.
Again, wrong context. I'm sure DevonDIver is an awesome instructor. The comment was in regard to the situation painted by him in regard to a review of a person who didn't even use the service, a review that clearly stated only the interaction with the manager and nothing more. His comments were about a slandering, devastating campaign against me and how would I react.
Red Sea Relax - and especially the dive centre - have some awesome reviews on TripAdvisor, but sadly, as always, negative publicity seems to have more impact than positive - which is how politicians win elections, after all. Doesn't matter how much good a person has done, there was that one time they got it wrong and this somehow makes them a bad person, and their whole entourage along with them. Is there anybody in this forum who never once got angry? You say the manager has "tipped his hand shown who he really is" and "you'd steer very far from the shop"... well then, that works both ways, because I reckon we'd all be very happy if you didn't steer in our direction in the first place.
When it comes to diving - business is not just business.
Regards,
Crowley
Pure BS. Cream rises to the top,
always. If you don't rise to the top its your fault and nobody elses. Stop the crazy talk of how no matter how good you are, you do one thing wrong and you're ruined. What a joke.
Man up please. My God, when are people simply going to own their faults and simply fix them instead of want everyone else to ignore them and blame the customer of all people?
The manager screwed up. He really isn't a very good manager. However, he can do 2 things -
1) cry and whine and rationalize poor me and how this guys a jerk
2) learn how to be a better manager. Put in place systems to fix the break down that occurred in this experience so it doesn't happen again. Learn to operate on a professional level of common respect and courtesy.
What simple changes could the manager have made to have turned this completely around and gotten a 5 star review? If he thinks about it, I'm sure in hind-sight now it's a few different words, a little different tone, the answering of a question or two, probably no more time then it took him to tear the OP apart.
He will either accept he made a mistake and learn from it or he will continue on, and take the risk the next time he emails a customer to bitch slap them, that they too might make it public like the OP did. He got what he deserved. He got 'outed'.
Get voice mail on your phone.
Discuss a policy with your staff when to and when not to give out your phone number
Accept that if you do choose to answer a phone call, you are now required to spend the time required to deal with the person on the other end
Don't send aggressive, sarcastic, unprofessional emails
Learn how to get customers to post positive reviews on online review websites
Accept that every customer is not your ideal customer, accept you will have problems, but pledge to only take actions that will reduce the problem not increase it
When it comes to business --- #1 - be the bigger man.