I’m one of many people in my community beyond thrilled to have a brand-new theater. After years of needing an updated movie house, we finally have a 14 screen megaplex with an Imax theater. The theater had a bit of a rough start during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, with unexpected, and unexplained fire alarms forcing the facility to evacuate multiple times. On site, the staff handed out passes to those ejected from their movies, but some patrons were still grumbling and others did not receive compensation for their ruined experiences at all. And what do dissatisfied customers do? Well, they go to Facebook, of course!
It’s interesting to me that the Regal Stonefield Stadium 14 & Imax has set up a Facebook page and earned more than 700 fans, and yet has done nothing on it’s page to respond to customer comments or complaints. If you go to the Facebook page you can see that there is not one comment or question to which the theater has responded. (The URL is https://www.facebook.com/pages/Regal-Stonefield-Stadium-14-IMAX/352615974822625?fref=ts — note that they haven’t even grabbed the custom URL to properly name the page)
Regal may think they’re the only game in town so they don’t need to treat their customers or fans well, or be responsive in social media. That’s too bad, because even though ticket sales are pretty good, they can still decline if customer service is truly awful. You can have a good theater, but a bad reputation may keep movie goers at home, or in the next town over for their big screen experiences.
I encourage the theater to make sure they’re paying attention to the page and to provide customers with the information they seek. If there’s a problem, such as the fire alarm issue, the fastest way to inform patrons of what’s happening and how they plan to handle it is to post those answers online, and since Stonefield already has a publishing presence on Facebook, there’s no better place to keep customers informed.