What would you do if a client publishes a bad review or lodges a complaint about your business?  

The Broadway Hotel in Blackpool, England is making news for all the reasons it was trying to avoid.

It has been reported in the world news that the Broadway Hotel has (or had) a term in its terms and conditions prohibiting guests from writing bad reviews. I can’t think how they could make this term stand up if challenged in court, if for no other reason than I doubt guests are provided a copy of the terms and conditions when making a booking or even checking in to the hotel .  If they had, this term should have raised a big red warning flag!

Broadway has, apparently “fined” its guests over a bad review they placed on TripAdvisor. I won’t comment on the legality of making an unauthorised charge to the guests’ credit card.

Looking at TripAdvisor, many of the reviews are pretty shocking, and bad reviews have been published for a number of years.  ( One wonders whether all the other reviewers were similarly penalised for their negative comments.)

Complaints are an early warning system

Receiving feedback- positive and negative should be considered essential to a business. If a business does not ask for, compile, assess and act on complaints it is heading for a fall, much like the potential widespread damage to Broadway Hotel’s reputation by making headline news around the world.

Complaints should be seen as an early warning system in risk management. They can be an early indicator of actual or likely problems such as:

• breaches of various laws, including consumer protection laws, trade practices, work , health and safety, privacy and others
• reputational damage
• the loss of customers
• problems with business processes and systems
• issues with staff
• faulty or dangerous products.

If your company’s compliance program does not include an effective process for handling complaints it may find itself being investigated by regulators, fined and penalised for non -compliance with legal obligations, losing business to competitors, losing good employees and ending up in Court.

Complaints should be valued, as should the customer that goes to the trouble to warn you of an issue before it becomes a serious incident.