A few nights ago, on Monday, December 12, to be exact, while browsing Facebook, I came across a post about a customer who wrote a very emotional albeit funny “break-up” letter with her favorite fastfood restaurant, Chic-Boy. I was immediately drawn to it because Chic-boy has become my favorite resto, too. Anyway, the author of that post, Sigrid Andrea Bernardo, apparently a writer, director and actress, narrated what happened to her on November 21 at the Chic-Boy Timog branch.

After reading it, I immediately thought of the Cebu Lechon Liempo meal waiting for me on our dining table, courtesy of Daddy Bong. He knows how I so love Chic-Boy that a few nights even, he asked if I’d be ok with just eating at Chic-Boy whenever we’d go out on dates. I didn’t hesitate when I said yes because really, their Cebu Lechon Liempo is just to die for, IMO. I was seriously debating within if I would eat it knowing that my husband lovingly went out of his way to buy me that pasalubong. It was already nearing midnight, but before coming to my final decision, I decided to read what Chic-Boy in its FB fanpage, had to say. And what they said there stunned me. But instead of publicly telling them what I thought, I decided to write them a private message instead. Here’s what I wrote:

I decided to message you in private since I don’t want to be just another person who wants to be embroiled in a controversy.

I love Chicboy. I have loved it eversince I first tasted the lechon liempo and sisig meal in Cityplace Divisoria two weeks ago. Since then, I have declared I would patronize it whenever I see a branch nearby. And since then, my husband, knowing how I love it, has been bringing me pasalubong from chicboy. Last week, we ate at Chicboy central mall in Biñan. He asked me if he could bring to a chicboy everytime we would have a date and I happily said yes. Tonight when he came home, he had another pasalubong for me. From Chicboy. It is now waiting for me on the dining table.

I have to admit, when I read the post, I thought of throwing it away and told myself I would never eat there anymore, not so much my doubt on the food’s cleanliness and fitness for consumption as the way chicboy is handling the whole controversy. You guys should learn about crisis management. It was clear that the author of that post only wanted you to apologize but no one, according to her did so. In fact, you went the other way (around) and showed defiance. The author was clearly pissed because she went to the place to enjoy your food but instead she ate something you can’t deny wasn’t there in the same way you can’t prove it was placed there on purpose to discredit you.

Now you are even threatening to sue her for libel because you were emboldened by people who said they would support you. You havve the money and means and maybe even clout to wage war against her. You will probably win the lawsuit but I hope you will also be able to prove yourselves and all that you did not have a liability and that that girl was really just out to get you and she was indeed being paid by somebody to ruin your reputation because if you can’t, then you will be judged accordingly.

I hope you will really do everything to make sure that sanitation is of great importance, and most especially, that you value your customers. You are not perfect so I hope you also know that the author might just have been telling the truth and in so doing, simply wanted an apology which you denied (apparently.) After all, I am pretty sure you know these things sometimes really happen.

In the end, I will still eat my husband’s chicboy pasalubong to me this evening. Masarap naman talaga ang chicboy. But I also hope you will learn how to deal with problems like this properly. And blaming the customer is not one of them especially when there is another customer who experienced almost the same thing in another branch.

If you will ask me if I believe that girl and what she said she experienced, then yes, I believe she was saying the truth. But would I stop eating at chicboy? No. I will still patronize chicboy, but with the hope that it will learn to do things correctly. And I hope it will start by reaching out to the disgruntled customer and apologizing as you should have done in the first place.

More power to you and I hope this incident will only make your resolve to keep sanitation and cleanliness, as well as good customer service your top priorities at all times. Thank you and Merry Christmas!

After sending this message to the Chicboy FB Fanpage, I went to eat Daddy Bong’s Chicboy pasalubong. Later, I decided to check my FB and lo and behold! Chicboy responded to my message. In it, Chicboy wrote:

Hello Kaye, thank you for your message. The incident as she claimed happened Nov 21. It is our policy to first apologize for any untoward incident or inconvenience we have caused our customers. She said in her FB post that she even went back that same night to talk to the franchisee. If she was not able to talk to the franchisee, why didn’t she write a letter to the franchisee? Why didn’t she write a letter to the franchisor? Why didn’t she text or call our Hotline. The complaint number is printed on our receipt? We are wondering why it took her 3 weeks before she decided to write about it in FB?

We are not threatening to sue her. We will sue her to find out the real story.

Thank you and Have a Merry Christmas too.

I thought the reply from Chicboy was not just defensive, it even reeked of arrogance, so I decided to reply to their message. I wrote:

If you will look at her post, she said that three weeks have passed without any word from you. I think she was clearly expecting an answer, a reaction from you which she did not get after complaining verbally that day, prompting her to post the incident on facebook. One thing I have learned from being a PR practitioner myself, is to always respond to a crisis the earliest possible time. You question her inability to file a formal complaint with your office yet you cannot say what you resolved to do after she verbally complained about her food. I think you should realize that not all customers would write letters of complaint, nor text or call your hotline to report what happened. You should realize that the easiest way for people to vent their frustrations is through social media. Never mind if it happened yesterday, a week before, three weeks even. Social networking sites have made it possible for things to go viral in just a few seconds. Yours is an example.

In any case, if you think she was amiss in doing what you thought was the correct thing to do, you were also amiss in that you let the problem sit there without realizing you were leaving it to hatch on its own. You were not proactive enough to solve the problem once it presented itself. Now, what you are doing is damage control, so to speak, by attacking back. You probably thought that girl would be content seething privately and was taken aback when you realized that like you, she wouldn’t take things sitting down. If, on the other hand, you will say you did not know about the problem until that post and the photos appeared on facebook, then the branch manager where the incident happened, has a lot of explaining to do, or else, you did not train your people to handle crises well enough, in which case, this proves to be a lesson difficult enough to learn from.

Also, you have been telling everyone that it is your policy to apologize the moment something goes wrong, yet nowhere in your page/profile does it say that the staff of the said branch clearly apologized for what happened. Saying it is one thing as opposed to actually doing it. Please don’t get me wrong. I am not antagonising you. I am just trying to give an alternative way of looking at things without being just overly critical. I really hope you will be able to get through this with everything still intact. And if you want to know, I enjoyed my chicboy dinner a while ago very much. As usual, the rice was cooked perfectly (believe me, mang inasal wouldn’t stand a chance! And I ate one just last Friday.) and the lechon was so tasty as usual.

Oh and if you want to know why I am suddenly very interested in this aside from the fact that I love Chicboy so much, it is because I am a customer myself who would maybe do the same if “properly” provoked. that is also why I explained to you how I see what happened.

After that, and until now, I never heard from Chic-boy. At the time, they hadn’t filed a case (tho I really don’t know if they have filed one already) against the author of the FB post, but they no longer responded to me. Maybe because they didn’t think I was worth responding to after all. Haha. Thing is, the way I see things, this is purely a PR crisis. Had they known how to respond properly to the customer, they might have kept this under wraps.  I also found their accusation against the author absurd. Telling everybody that the customer might have been hired to do a demolition job against the restaurant, or simply was trying to get attention for herself was plain dumb and lame. Where else in the world is the customer always not right? In this country of course! and when you complain about bad service in whatever form, you get branded as publicity-hungry or a hired demolition expert, or worse, you get sued for trying to stand up for your rights.

Going into the F&B business is really not a walk in the park. However, more than that, I think we can all learn a thing or two about customer service with the story above. I hope all have learned their lesson well.

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