Gurgaon based restaurant – Lemp BrewPub and Kitchen is all over the internet for the past couple of days, well, for all the wrong reasons. Since, Tuesday it is trending and repeatedly being slammed for deceiving, harassing and misbehaving with a group of youngsters.
This post is not about who is right and who is wrong, or who was lying and who was not. That’s a different debate all together.
I have followed the story and the more I did, I realized it has become a very interesting social media case study. The fact that the blog post that started it all, was later taken down only ended up adding more fuel to the twitter fire (here’s the link to the mirror post: http://www.scribd.com/doc/147181239/Lemp-Experience)
It’s a classic example of how powerful social media has truly become and cautious brands have to be when it comes to dealing with negative posts and reviews.
Few interesting observations from the incident
- Until the issue appeared, the reviews for Lemp on Zomato, with the average rating of 3.5, with some very good reviews and a few reviews about experiencing poor hospitality and rude staff behavior.
- Since Tuesday Zomato has 900+ reviews for the same place, 95% of them being harshly negative. Hence, the restaurant rating has faced a substantial southward fall. Notably, most of the negative reviews are from people who have never visited the restaurant. These were more reactions to the blog post than actual reviews.
- Till yesterday, there was no action on Lemp’s social media pages; both Facebook and Twitter pages have not voiced an apology or explanation in its defence. But, the restaurant has changed its name on Facebook to Purple Bar and Lemp in brackets. The FB page incidentally is listed as person and not business, which is not a smart social media move, since its a violation of FB’s guidelines.
- Shruti, who claims to be a regular costumer at Lemp, drafted a blog on Tuesday explaining the entire incident from the restaurants point of view and also blames the youngsters for ardent and keen campaigning to damage the restaurant’s reputation. Again this review’s credibility was questioned because the customer claimed to know a lot more about the incident than a regular patron who wasn’t present at the time of the alleged infamous incident with the ‘Gurgaon Victims’ would.
- Lemp’s reply on Zomato got a lot of brickbats. Admittedly, their response to what looked like a review from one the people involved in the recent Gurgaon incident came across as high handed and boorish.
Lemp’s Response On Zomato
Image Source
- A polite and perhaps more gracious response to the post would have saved the restaurant from a lot of negative publicity.
- In all this, Zomato was pretty fast to reply yesterday since their name was at stake too. The founder of Zomato has blogged about their take on the entire incident, which was logical and to the point. Again there were some negative reviews to this post as well, but one has to admit overall Zomato stuck to a neutral tone.
- As of today, Lemp has released a press release to refurbish its image, explaining the reason behind their silence and their part of the story. The restaurant owner quotes “It is very unfortunate that through irresponsible use of social media an attempt to tarnish our reputation, which we have built steadfastly, has been made.”
- The restaurant claims to release the snapshots and CCTV videos soon, which feature the order of events. If it’s unedited and supports the restaurant’s version, it may indeed help Lemp.
Lemp’s press release comes in quite late in the picture, so it’s potential for damage control at this point is questionable from a social media management point of view.
Now, whether the blog post was really a planned attempt to tarnish the restaurant’s image (as claimed by Lemp), or the story of the alleged mistreatment at the hands of staff had some truth in it, the fact remains the restaurant’s image did take a severe hit.
So, is there a lesson for Brands, especially those in the retail business here? Most definitely, in fact there’s more than just one lesson:
-Try not to let your customers leave dissatisfied.
-If their behavior is indeed high handed and they go on to post negative reviews about your business, the best approach would be that of humility. Roll out the red-carpet for them. Chances are your gracious response will win you new customers.
-In the hospitality business, ‘hospitality’ is the keyword, it should reflect in all your reactions to negative and even belligerent posts.
-Try and move the conversation to a one-on-one medium instead of getting into a social media war. A lot of brands when faced with negative reviews respond with the offer of having someone from their team call the customer to resolve the issue. One can share an email address where the aggrieved customer could send in their contact number and the issue can be resolved amicably.
-If it is indeed a malicious campaign against your business, you still have to make sure you look good on social media. In such cases, you could report spammy reviews to the forum hosting them, most review sites can identify reviews from the same ip address and delete the same. Having said that, even to a malicious campaign the response should not come across as aggressive.
-Social media users will judge your business and your attitude to customers in general based on your response to the barrage of negative publicity.
From this point on, it would indeed be quite interesting to find out whether or how the Lemp BrewPub and Kitchen brews a solid come back.
There is in fact a very informative and comprehensive post that has analyzed the Lemp ‘non-social media’ impact in detail:
http://itwofs.com/beastoftraal/2013/06/12/10-social-media-and-non-social-media-observations-on-the-lemp-brewpub-mess/
Here are a few other interesting reads:
http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/negative-blog-post-killed-lemp-brewpub-kitchen-social-164046706.html
http://daily.bhaskar.com/article/DEL-lemp-brewpub-victim-or-accused-netizens-pass-their-verdict-4290565-NOR.html