Trying to bring customers back into the stores, CEO Ron Johnson announced last week that J.C. Penney will be bringing back sales. I guess Mr. Johnson’s about-face was as a result of the 50% slide in the stock price over the past year. Clearly, J.C. Penney has not been listening to its customers. Yet, the writing was on the wall – Facebook’s wall, that is. Almost 3 million people are “fans of”/”like” J.C. Penney’s Facebook Page. That’s quite the community, wouldn’t you agree? A following that takes years to build, yet can take less than a day to destroy. 
Here’s the message they posted this past Friday on their Facebook wall:
New Facebook page everyone! Time to rebuild. Time to wipe the slate clean. New name “jcp”, new gray logo, and best of all… “We did it for you”!
Hmmm, do companies really think their customers are stupid?
As you skim the posts about the weak brands that J.C. Penney now carries, the bare new look of the stores, and the pricing changes, it’s clear that customers are very disappointed with the Penney transition. The negative comments far outweigh the positive ones. But every now and then you read a post from a Penney loyalist who’s supportive of the company, advocating on their behalf. So like most communities, there’s internal discussion going on; people engaging with others from similar “tribes”; agreements, disagreements. A lot of loyal customers voicing their concerns on the site. Yet what’s glaringly absent are comments from J.C. Penney itself. No one from the company is engaging with its followers. Maybe the brand is listening, but the Facebook fans sure wouldn’t know it.
…the Voice of the Customer
One wonders if the digital community mirrors the brick and mortar.
Perhaps the new corporate culture, that includes ignoring customers, has trickled down from the top. At a time when the CEO should be listening to his customers, with the company having lost $4 billion in revenues during his tenure, he may feel he knows better. After all, few believed that his Apple store concept would make money for the consumer electronics giant. He proved them all wrong.
More likely though, the business probably has so many internal silos that no one realizes the value of the customer data they’ve built up over the years. They may just think of Facebook as a digital sandbox; a time-waster where people who have nothing better to do post useless comments and try to ruin the reputation of brands. It’s likely that the J.C. Penney Facebook community isn’t even on any of JCP’s leadership’s radar screens. At least that’s how it looks from the outside.
What other explanation for shutting down a community with almost 3 million subscribers, and starting fresh? To re-brand under the new “JCP” acronym? To rebuild the community under the JCP brand hoping to wipe the slate clean of any negative sentiment?
C’mon…wake up J.C. Penney! You’re going to piss more people off, and lose a ton of opportunity in the process.
We have to give credit where credit is due, however. J.C. Penney could have deleted all the negative posts and comments on their original Facebook page. Instead they chose to ignore customer complaints, they chose not to engage in conversation, and they chose to miss any opportunity to show support for what few advocates they had, and start fresh.
Much has been written about the psychology of service recovery; i.e., how resolving a customer complaint is an opportunity to create a stronger relationship with the customer than if the service failure had never occurred in the first place. Service recovery is an opportunity to build loyalty. One needs only to Google the term “service recovery paradox” to read the various scholarly articles, white-papers, and blog posts about it. But customer outreach and engagement needs to be done on a one-on-one basis and it needs to be part of an organization’s overall business strategy. One might have expected this to be the reason for the new Facebook page, but alas, we are still scratching our heads.
Great customer service is clearly not on JCP’s list of strategic objectives. Or if it is, some people are pretty good at paying lip-service to the initiative. And you can be sure that when they considered what the overarching Customer Experience should “look” like, JCP didn’t bother to ask their own customers what was important to them.
Companies pay megabucks to research firms to build consumer panels that they can dip into for opinions on an ongoing basis. They pay big bucks to collect customer feedback, typically through surveys pushed out after a transaction is completed with the brand. All of this is part of a “Voice of the Customer” (VoC) program. You can be sure that J.C. Penney has this type of program in place. All big retailers do.
You think the VoC team even knows that a Social Media community exists?
If they do, do you think they’ve even put two-and-two together, and have considered pulling in feedback from the Facebook community? Social Communities and Social Media Customer Care provide non-invasive, truly unbiased environments for collecting Voice of the Customer feedback. The sad part is, in many large companies, people don’t communicate very well across departments – the VoC team probably doesn’t talk to the Social Media team and vice-versa.
And so we can only shake our heads in disbelief, as we watch a powerful brand, with a deep-rooted American heritage, make a decision that makes no strategic business sense whatsoever and throw the baby out with the bath water.
Wow – classical Social Media What NOT to do 101 huh?