Relax – you won’t feel a thing
There is a relatively new, high-profile dentist in Chicago. She started her practice not far from my home with a direct marketing campaign that was extremely well done. Great branding. An appealing, immediately recognizable name, good graphics and compelling price and service offers. Something you rarely see from a dentist. They drove a TON of business with their amazing campaign. So much in fact that she quickly hired another dentist and opened a second office not far from the first one.
In the short time the practice has been open, it has the second highest numbers of dentist reviews on Yelp – the very popular review site that is widely used here in the windy city. It also has close to the lowest score in the dental category with gory and frightening comments like:
“I could go on with many other stories, like the time she drilled through my lip then yelled at me and stormed out of the room as blood was running down my chin. (Seriously I couldn’t make this up, I have pictures to prove it)”
“It started to feel like I was in an abusive relationship”
“The cleaning and treatment HURT (I had trouble swallowing the next day from being jabbed with the anesthesia needle), the visit was expensive even with insurance, and I was billed for a procedure which I had declined.”
There are many more just like these. Even though there are a few good comments sprinkled in, you would have to be a brave soul to venture into that office. In the past, they could have gone for a long time and possibly improved their dentistry skills before word got around about them. Not today.
Chicago is a big small town and I heard through the local grapevine that the dentist may have been asking around to see if it was possible to get the negative postings removed from the Web. Not going to happen. Even if it were possible, it is far too late for that. Their reputation is toast. The huge start-up investment they made and the initial excitement it generated are lost forever. Their only hope is to change their name, start fresh in another city and pray no one discovers their history.
You Have a New Boss
The sado-dentist is an extreme example of a business that will likely die a hasty death at the hands of its customers, but this type of thing is happening every day. At the other end of the spectrum, Tom’s Shoes, a company that gives away a free pair of shoes to the poor for each pair it sells, has grown like crazy exclusively through the good viral customer word-of-mouth. Companies no longer control most of the public information and conversation about their products and services. It is now in the hands of the masses – they are your new bosses. Organizations that will be successful in the future understand that. It is the goal of this blog to provide information, insight and resources to help credit unions continues to get good reviews from their bosses.
It is amazing how fast word gets around now thanks to the internet. The web 2.0 craze is going to really hurt some of us or really help some of us. I found recently that some ex-employees of our credit union had started a group on Facebook where they were sharing their complaints about working here! The site has been inactive for almost a year or so now but no one is going to think that working here is all that great if they see a whole Facebook group dedicated to people who did not like working here.