On Monday morning a co-worker passed me the link to the image above advertising a great deal on golf clubs on Amazon. Now I have been looking into learning golf for a while now, but am clueless to what a good set of clubs is. So seeing a set for $112 seemed like a no-brainer to me, especially since the co-worker noted that they were at 90% off.
The deal sounded too good to be true for Amazon, maybe for the newly acquired Woot, but none the less I checked it out. The offer was not from Amazon, or its affiliates, but rather a company called the Golf Warehouse (TGW). So I logged onto Amazon and placed my order.
Later in the day, we had some water cooler talk and found out that the pricing was an error and discussed scenarios that TGW might take to rectify the situation. While none would be satisfactory to everyone, as a PR guy, I figured they would avoid a public relations nightmare. In the morning, I received the following email alerting me that the order had been cancelled:
Greetings from Amazon.com,
We’re writing to inform you that your order 102-6266013-2851404 from The Golf Warehouse has been canceled.
Your credit card was not charged for this order.
If you’re still interested in this item, please search for it again on Amazon.com.
We’ve included your order details below for reference.
We value you as a customer and hope you will continue shopping on Amazon.com.
I was expecting more of an explanation or an apology, but since the email came from Amazon, not TGW, I went looking for more answers. With none on the TGW site, I followed the social media breadcrumbs and stumbled into a pile of poop that would make any PR person cringe.
On TGW’s Facebook page there were comments ranging from inquisitive to vulgar. Now, instead of replying in an official corporate capacity, the CEO of the company turned the PR headache into a social media nightmare.
How could the top executive from TGW make things worse you ask?
Instead of issuing a reply penned by his trusty team of flacks that was informative, Brad Wolansky, replied from his personal account complete with picture of him in front of a private jet. Now while this kind of response is great and transparent, his company was in the middle of a crisis and should have only issued statements from the company account as his replies opened him up for personal attacks and insults. Now while I am all for transparency from companies, the CEO is not the person who should be frank and commenting to customers, especially if there is no history of engagement from him.
On top of these snafus, the team monitoring the Facebook page was also deleting commentary and posts not only from angry customers, but also from their employees including this one from Wolansky:
Folks,
We work in partnership with Amazon. We send them a product feed. Their system digests it then displays the products on their site. The TGW feed was received at Amazon, their system inadvertently changed the set price to the same price as the single club price causing the issue. You guys can spin this anyway you want, but those are the facts. Nothing beyond that.
This morning some of you brought to our attention some correctly priced single price clubs that had product descriptions which included references to sets. These were not incorrectly priced as the previous problem, but were confusing in presentation. We’ve corrected those or are in process. We’ve tried to be open and transparent here. Profanity, inappropriate personal information/attacks or spam-like info is deleted by the moderator. As I said this am, we’re working with Amazon to have further communications this afternoon. Please be patient to watch for that.
Brad.
I admire the passion and want to do right for the customer, but talk about dropping the ball and throwing someone under the bus.
Looking at this situation with my PR and SM hat on, there are a number of things that I would have done differently. The first would have been to change the listing on Amazon, alerting people to the error immediately as well as making a note on their site and social pages. While I understand complications with partner sites, staying silent and leaving the offer up over the weekend would have alleviated some of the outrage. These early postings also could have quelled the backlash with empty promises of giving answers and the wishy-washy answers that were posted on the Facebook page. I would have also avoided passing the buck to Amazon on multiple occasions.
Around 4:00 p.m. yesterday afternoon, the company took the traditional PR route and issued a concise statement on their site. If they had done this in the beginning, some of the backlash on their Facebook page could have been avoided. Instead, we’re left with another example of a company engaging before thinking of the consequences. Hopefully Wolansky’s personal page didn’t get too many bad comments.
What would you have done if you were in the TGW PR team?
Image – Barstool Sports
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by jeffespo, jeffespo, Social Media Insider, JobShoots, JobShoots and others. JobShoots said: Pricing gaffe leads to PR, SM fail for TGW http://bit.ly/abU7zf #news #socialmedia […]
I wouldn't be calling myself CEO unless I was going to offer a legitimate remedy. Now people associate the CEO's inaction or insufficient action with TGW. There is a face to this mess.
Jeff, it was not just this one set of clubs (the Taylormade R9 deal) but Amazon (TGW was the merchant affiliate) offered a set of Adams A7 hybrid wedges. Four clubs for $62.50. 90% off deal–which is something I look hard at. Because it was Amazon (with a famed A-Z guarantee) I bought two sets–one for my father-inlaw and one for me. Into my cart and bought. My debit card was processed and the money for the purchased locked down and then a friend of mine pointed out it wasn't such a great deal. It was just one club for $62.50– a #7 Adams A7. I was perplexed for a moment until I found the screen shot I printed out of my purchase and determined that Amazon changed the goods after I purchased them. Now if that ain't bait and switch, I don't know what would be. I contacted the merchant and Amazon and this order too was cancelled. One of the remarkable things here apart from the law which requires a merchant to honor and advertised price in most cases, it that Amazon purportedly has the much hyped A-Z guarantee. Paragraph 8 of that guarantee states that in a fixed price transaction the seller is obligated to sell the goods at the listed price to buyers who meet the Seller's terms. That's us Bubba. Merchant's accept the risk of dealing with these Amazons and living under the sword of this guarantee to do business of Amazon. But, apparently this sword is made of plastic, because Amazon selectively applies this guarantee and would not stand behind it in either of these deals. So much for the credibility of Amazon.
Blaming Amazon was not a smart move but I do believe Amazon is a bit guilty. They are the facilitator in this situation. Similar to a child playing in my yard and getting hurt, ultimately I am responsible. A quick response through business channels could have prevented much of the backlash. Now TGW and Amazon have a mess on their hands. Their latest response is a 20% discount, on regular priced items through Amazon.com only for items that simply do not exist. More avoidance and by doing this Amazon has tied themselves to the situation even more. I would have made the coupon good for anything at TGW.com A simple 'We messed up' in the very beginning would have sufficed. Now they may have more issues than before.
Jeff – Good thoughts all around on how companies should and most definitely should not handle potential crisis situations (or in this case, more of just negligence) in the digital age. Yes, transparency and having open, honest executives are great things, but in the case of most businesses, it is almost always the best policy to have your dedicated PR/communications team handle communications with outside constituents in situations like this, especially if, as you noted, the CEO has no prior history of directly interacting with customers.
This really brings up a larger issue that we're beginning to see more in the social age of businesses – the fact that many executives and CEOs are being sold a lot of fluff about how they need to be in constant interaction with their customers and how they need to be as open, honest and passionate about their products and services as their customers are. That's all well and great, but in the real world that we all live in – the world that doesn't always take place online and can have serious consequences if one or two off-hand remarks that are made online on Twitter, Facebook or a company blog get out to the right people, this type of uber-transparency can have some serious consequences for the business.
It will be very interesting to see how businesses handle situations like this going forward an the balance they strike between being open and honest with customers, but also making sure they protect the business in the long run.
Great thoughts all around!
The worst time to determine your crisis communication strategy is in the middle of the crisis.
Companies make mistakes, that I can handle. What the problem here was that they didn't have a plan mapped out for how to deal with dust ups like this when they do occur. Companies need to have clear and well publicized rules for when they decide to delete comments. Users need to know in advance that their comments will be deleted if the violate certain rules (language, copyright, etc) I'll bet that the person deleting was pretty isolated from everything else and simply trying to keep everything squeaky clean.
Lee, thanks for the comment. I completely agree. The big issue was letting this slide through the weekend. If it was caught immediately, there may have been 10-20 orders instead of people ordering 20-30 sets of clubs. I also think that the loosey goosey approach to the comments and what ones stayed/were deleted were pretty bush league. Some people from the Wichita area hit me up on Twitter noting that only spam was deleted. I guess I missed the lesson where angry customers were considered spam.
Some people have to learn the hard way.
Well whatever he did, he would be associated with the mess RYBO. I appreciate the comment.
GolfLove, my co-workers and I noticed those as well. It was good of you to print everything out and if you are looking to go the legal action route, I would look at their Facebook page where there are others rallying behind the same flag.
I also love Amazon as they stand behind everything that they sell.
@ EOAAT there are three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth. TGW will take more of the heat, because Amazon has acquired a ton of people equity and good will.
Thanks Keith. This is something that, unfortunately, we will see more about. Remember the TechCrunch article where startups see more value in social equity than PR?
This is an example of things that our craft is trained to do. Now if Dave were commenting back to folks the way that Gary Vaynerchuck does, then maybe it would have worked with his response. However going off half-cocked with no street credibility is a recipe for disaster.
Being compulsive and organized does have a few advantages. But “naw,” I have no interest in bringing legal action myself, (although it appears to actionable in theory, but where I am left is annoyed for the experience (and thus far several hundred dollars behind (money has not been released from the use of my debit card) as I believed that Amazon had real integrity versus the all to common place situational integrity. Amazon is no longer the corporate apple of my eye and TGW is suffering for their apparent ineptitude likely far beyond their culpability (unlike BP as an example). Zappos had a similar incident and they ate 1.6 million dollars worth of shoes to maintain their integrity and perhaps their ideals. Expensive, but guess where I do all my shoe shopping now… . I like dealing with companies I can trust.
Great point on Zappos, they spent 1.6 million I believe. And it is awful on the debit card situation, hopefully it gets sorted out soon. Trust is a major factor for me as well and I try to help grow that for my employer while working in the social media space.