Saturday, November 13, 2010

Bad Business Practices: Dealing With Haters

If you're a business owner, how do you deal with haters? Like any problem, you have to understand why you have the problem before you grab your tools & start fixing it.

It doesn't take a genius to see why people hate Oracle, but this post is not about Oracle. I'd like to use Khalid Al-Zanki as an example here because of some of his tweets that have been surfacing ever since Bashar and I wrote about his bad business practices.

Before going through some pictures, I'd like to note that we've never mentioned his personal life. We've only highlighted his fraudulent approaches to marketing his services and himself.







As you can see, in these pictures and ones from previous posts, that his approach to all our exposures was to warn people to not listen to us, write a general post about what his method is without saying that he uses it, and rather than looking at things from a professional point of view, he quickly saw them as personal.

How did Khalid deal with haters? Not as a professional for sure:
- He didn't bother replying to us directly.
- Always deleted our questions on his posts.
- Switched his Twitter account to Private, disallowing his followers to read about what's going on.
- Rather than admitting his mistakes, he hides for a while then pushes for more.
- He scolded people publicly when he didn't like a reaction or something someone did (like tagging him in an event in Facebook)

So from the last image, in addition to his funny typo, we can guess what he's gonna be up to & count on us coming after his cunning and dirty approaches at doing business, over & over until he learns about something called ETHICS.

2 comments:

Haider said...

Hi MBH,

To be fair to Khalid, he may not have been referring to you or Bashar as the haters, but others who are bad-mouthing him.

Having said that, I definitely agree with you that he could've taken a better approach in dealing with negative remarks.

People don't start hating things out of the blue. Sure, there are those who hate the successful, but it doesn't mean that everyone who complains does so out of hate.

In fact, I disagree with the term "haters" when it comes to businesses, and even bloggers. I hate the term "trolls" even when used about people that leave negative, destructive, and hate-filled comments. I may disagree with their attitude, but it's important to focus on what little truth there may be in their feedback.

If no truth exists, then it's sensible to point that out in a respectful manner. A basic principle in creating positive customer experiences is to never blame the customer, or accuse them of making a mistake. They will figure that out when they are presented with evidence and spoken to with respect.

Negative feedback is the perfect opportunity to win people over, which companies and business owners should embrace whole-heartedly.

MBH said...

Thank you for your valuable input Haider.

I think you've explained what I wanted to say in better terms.

I don't know what's wrong with Khalid. He sure made it sound like a holy war (see first image)!

Rather than acknowledge that his illusive business practices are wrong, he hid for a while and he continues as if nothing happened, without addressing those who supposedly "hate" him.

I would also like to point that I was opposing any personal attacks against Khalid. You see for yourself in this comment at 248am forums.