What’s really amazing to me is that the Celeste crew is clearly monitoring this thread and they still won’t give Karen her $150 back.
3000 members ($450,000) later, it’s more important to you to keep that $150 than to smooth it over and put an end to this disaster?
Guys, we’ve seen the screen shots. It’s obvious that Karen questioned some of the educational claims, which seem at this point to have been considerably exaggerated. So, ok you can double down on that and kick her out of the group and not give her her money back but just imagine if you said instead: “We apologize for any confusion regarding Celeste’s credentials. We never intended to convey the impression that Celeste has obtained a Neuropsychology degree and will endeavor to be more clear in the future. Thank you, Karen, for bringing this to our attention.” Is that so hard? Imagine where you would be today if someone had tried that one on for size instead of kicking Karen out of the group.
Which brings me to, once again, ladies, we’ve seen the screen shots. Karen asked you about 50 times for screen shots of where she broke the rules and you wouldn’t provide bupkis. This FB group is a text based lifeform: for Karen to have been argumentative or breaking rules, it would have had to have happened in screenshottable form. How on earth did she manage to commit an infraction serious enough to get kicked out without having left a screenshottable trail of the offending behavior? Let’s stop tapdancing around and just recognize that it’s obvious that she was kicked out for questioning Celeste’s exaggerated credentials. Which is suboptimal, but did we really have to compound the issue by refusing to give her $150 back? $450,000 later you couldn’t just give this lady her $150 back when you couldn’t find (kof “couldn’t find” kof) a single screenshot of her offending behavior in a text based forum?
It was hang on, let me review the last 50 posts on this thread …THIS important to you to keep Karen’s $150? With 3000 happy members you can’t give one person who isn’t vibing their $150 back just to keep the peace?
Instead of just focusing your energies in the 2999 people who think you walk on water and clearly don’t give a shit whether or not you actually have a neuropsychology degree, we just HAD to keep that $150. Look at the length of your responses to her - you were willing to invest that amount of time and bandwidth in keeping an unhappy customer’s $150 and going round and round with her, rather than just giving it back and being done? I make a LOT less than $450k and pay my house cleaner around $300 a month because I’d rather be out $300 than spend time and bandwidth cleaning the kitchen, and here you guys are going ten rounds with Karen over a buck fifty rather than just giving the money back and focusing that energy on the 2999 other clients who love you instead??
And now here we are. 3000 members and $450,000 later, a disagreement with one member over $150 has landed some fairly damning screenshots (it being a text based forum, and all) out on the internet. Your $150 conversation with Karen is now being viewed by thousands, if not tens of thousands of people. Certainly by a few multipliers more people than even exist in your group. And rather than just giving her the money back, you’re sending houseguests in to COTH to double down and write us paragraphs and paragraphs about the Karen disagreement?? So now you’re spending you energy telling an audience of several times more than your actual group all about your disagreement with one customer and remaining firmly entrenched in the custerfluck, which I don’t know if you have noticed has started to snowball, rather than just spending this same amount of energy on the people who already like you and are already or potentially willing to give you their money???
Omffffggggg guys…
What if, (hear me out) instead of all that, you tried something like this:
“Hi folks, this is Celeste. This thread has taken on quite a life of its own and I wanted to come here in person to address some of the concerns and questions that have been raised.
First, I do not have a Neuropsychology degree. I’ve taken some classes in the field but I do not have a degree and never meant to lead anyone to believe that I did. I apologize for any confusion and will endeavor to be more clear on that in the future.
Secondly, with a group of over 3000 members, the occasional misunderstanding is bound to happen. I have addressed the situation with our concerned member directly and have refunded her money as a gesture of good will.
Thirdly, now that several thousand people have read about me on COTH, I’d love to invite you in to come see what I’m really about - which is helping the horses we all love. As such, for the next three days, I’d like to offer everyone a 30% discount to join the masterclass - just use the code COTH and come join the conversation!
Doing this will enable me to shift the conversation away from how unhappy one Karen is and allow me to market -for free!- my already created digital content to several thousand more people who already have disposable income and engage with horse topics online. Normally I’d have to pay Facebook about $900 to run such a targeted ad but if I just did this, I could do it for free! And when you think about it, a one time $105 really isn’t all that much when compared to your average horse expense (people spend more than that just not doing their own dishes!), so if I get 50 people out of the thousands here to give me a go at the discounted rate, that would be $5,250 more in my pocket for reselling the same content I have already created.”
Would that really be so hard?
But by all means, keep doubling down and doing what you’re doing.
