OYO Rooms' viral consumer rant opens up the Pandora's box

Social media has driven personalized interaction between consumers and brands further, demanding them to get more sensitive towards their customers. Social media engagement can make or break a brand. We are still unsure of where OYO Rooms stands after the heated social media post shared by a customer.

On January 25, a furious customer vented out his anger on Facebook after a distressing experience in Mumbai with the brand OYO Rooms. Unlike the customer, to briefly explain the incident, the customer had booked a room with a hotel located at Khar, Mumbai with OYO Rooms. However, he failed to get the service he was promised.

The customer faced a distressing experience by the extremely poor communication from the other end, to add on he was declined a room after paying for it for over two hours, and finally to fuel his rage, was provided with an unsanitary room after fighting a long battle.

The post opened up the Pandora'x box which refused to close as other empathetic consumers took to this opportunity to express their similar experiences and fury towards OYO Room’s service.

Flip side

The service providers grabbed some spotlight after this incidence and managed to use social media to their benefit. After hearing out the rampant words of the consumer, OYO Rooms responded promptly apologizing for their actions.

It was observed that OYO Rooms bragged their strong social media presence by replying rather apologetically to every consumer patiently. They personally replied to every comment and assured on the public forum to streamline concerns and look into each of them.

Win-win for both?

Social media became a medium for the customers to voice out their problems faced in unity and get a closure for their concerns.

But primarily such customer complaints on social media aided the brand in overcoming the operational deficiency and also gave them a chance to understand their consumer needs without conducting any survey as such, and let’s not forget it also gave them few hours of glory to be in the spotlight.

A piece of advice

Maybe, the brand can take this opportunity as growing experience to mold themselves into a better, consumer-friendly organization and a use the chance to improvise on their communication services.

Talking about telephonic or social media communication, the brand could probably assign reference numbers to every customer in agony to lessen their pain instead of repeating the entire scenario like in this case.

This classic example of a brand-consumer relationship on social media possesses a learning curve for every brand to maintain a healthy social media image.