The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [40]
4. Don’t panic, and keep perspective. Acting quickly doesn’t mean panicking. Individuals cannot be running around freaking out every time somebody says something negative about them. Companies are the same. Building trust involves knowing not only what criticisms are being leveled by customers but also who the speakers are, and how, or if, to respond. Almost every service, whether it’s Target, Virgin, Yelp, Amazon, or Joie de Vivre Hotels, has reviews. Of a hundred reviews of a hotel or restaurant, most may be four stars, but some of the reviews will inevitably be negative. A few people say, “That food was inedible,” or “The waiter was surly.” It’s true that a series of bad reviews on Yelp or Zagat can be deadly for a local restaurant. On the other hand, when consumers go to look at reviews, they are accustomed to seeing a range of ratings. And many people have learned to evaluate the evaluators. If the reviewer is a twenty-one-year-old who apparently likes to stay up late and make a lot of noise, he may be disgruntled because a hotel’s management told him to keep it down. Or the reviewers may be a seventy-year-old couple who wants quiet, and no late-night activity near their room.
5. Pay special attention to people in the network (aka your customers). When people are members of Zipcar or a food co-op, they are inside a network. They’ve already bought into the vision of the service and are part of a community. If an issue arises, they will usually work to resolve it. They have something at stake and are biased toward mutual success. The stakes are also higher for the business. If a customer is mistreated and complains about it on Facebook, the company has not only lost a subscriber but potentially soured relationships and its brand with a broader base. Unfortunately, sometimes people in competitive businesses do pose as subscribers to complain about a rival company. The good news is that when a company acts fairly, it’ll usually get another chance.
bad behavior and personal brands.
What happens when Mesh customers act badly? This is a concern voiced by those who argue for the advantages of ownership. What if some guy who uses a shared car before me has a kid who throws animal crackers all over the seat? He was supposed to leave the car like he found it, full of gas, not animal crackers. If I had gotten to Mini Mucho and it had animal crackers all over the back seat, I would have considered it a bad first experience. I would have called Zipcar, and considered it a serious inconvenience.
With Zipcar and other Mesh services, how members treat the cars, tools, bikes, or homes in circulation will inevitably affect other users. I’ve been guilty of leaving empty plastic water bottles and newspapers in rental cars as I took off sprinting to catch my plane. There will be these kinds of mistakes, but there will also be people who choose not to play by the rules. Services will likely build in a reputation system to identify