Word Travels Fast

Two blog entries in one day?  Unheard of with how busy I have been lately, but definitely justified.  Maybe I am just trying to win the Core3 Blog of the Month trophy though! 

I wanted to write a quick post to update the situation I had with Fathead earlier today, but also to point out a very interesting thing I noticed.  That interesting thing was the social media prowess of the Dan Gilbert empire (Quicken Loans, Fathead, Cleveland Cavaliers, ePrize, etc.).  I will dive more in to that in a moment

Earlier today, I wrote a blog post on Core3Solutions.com about my experience with a Fathead.com order I had recently placed (see this entry if you haven't already).  I wrote it with multiple reasons in mind: To give me a chance to vent, to talk about how we focus our attention here at Core3, and finally, in hopes of somehow gaining the attention of someone at Fathead who would care.  From my post, I accomplished all of that and more.  Within a few hours, a Web Marketing and Social Media expert at Quicken Loans (a sort of sister company to Fathead) sent me an email expressing serious concern and noted that it would be corrected very soon.  Shortly after that, I received a phone call from Fathead and the situation was corrected.  Even further, we received a personal email from the president of Fathead, once again apologizing for the situation.

There are a few big things to take away from this experience:

1) Fathead and the other companies in the Dan Gilbert portfolio seem to be very good at monitoring their status in the world of social media.  They quickly noticed our blog post, tweets, and Facebook status posts (I completely forgot about LinkedIn until after that fact), contacted our company, and rectified the situation within a matter of hours because of it.  In a market where reputation matters now more than any other time and every single customer counts, I applaud them for their efforts.  This is something that every company, no matter how big or small, should spend time watching.

2) Fathead did an excellent job of admitting they were wrong.  I know from personal experience that as much as you may think you have the right policies in place and as much as you might train your employees to do the right thing for your company, you're not always guaranteed to get the results you want.  Someone might be having a bad day, perhaps the last customer laid in to them, or perhaps their view is different that yours or you did not present your story clearly to them.  What matters the most to me is when a company acknowledges that they made a mistake and will make valiant efforts to correct it in the future, which is exactly what Fathead did.

Life is too short to hold grudges, not only with people but also with companies.  In the past, I was sometimes quick to have a single experience with a company and never change my mind or attitude about them.  It might be that I am a bit older and wiser now, but I have a three strikes policy now, rather than one strike and you're out.  I take the time to try and understand where a company or individual might be coming from and if they admit error on their end and don't repeat the same mistake twice, they are still a company I have no problem working with.  I guess it's kind of the whole "fool me twice" mentality.

Nonetheless, thank you again to Fathead for rectifying the situation and thank you to their President, Todd, for the personal email and apology.  They are a company I will most likely purchase from again.  Especially since they have these sweet dinosaur graphics that I really want!

Posted August 20, 2009 | Read all posts by Paul Chambers