Groupon sales rep threatens restaurant with negative Yelp reviews

Quite so. In the cold calling business people hanging up on you is par for the course...

I thought the same at first and honestly expected that the guy had just flat out committed libel. But after a tiny bit of research, I found that his claims about the restaurant's cleanliness were in fact accurate. (http://bit.ly/16xkdCO)

So while he probably was just writing the review to help his friend, his review is informative and factually based so really, there is no reason to remove it or the guy's account as far as I can tell.

This also makes Andy J's threat to make his active Yelp friends aware of his discontent with the restaurant make all the more sense as they are obviously better at it than him.

It is a story about Groupon. How can they let their staff get into this situation where they are so desperate as to make threats? How did they not know about and fix the poor experience with Groupon previously? How are the staff paid - is the commission component so high that they have to make sales no matter what? Is the training and are the SOPs so poor that the staff are free to operate on the edges of legality?

Is the culture such that anything goes?

Are the systems that review performance of sales reps not catching up with this sort of behaviour?

Groupon allowed this to happen, and it's for Groupon to fix.

Firing the guy would be a knee jerk reaction that would not to me be the right one. Not firing him and doing nothing would be worse. The best answer is a blame-free full review of how this occurred, and how they can design their organisation and process to make it never occur again.

That bell has already been rung, honey. That bell has already been rung.

He's the one who published his personal cell phone number and office desk number in his written extortion letter, while acting as an official representative of Groupon, from his authentic Groupon email account. Not my problem.

If you really want to get to the root of the problem, you might try cold calling his number, and advising HIM he shouldn't put his cell phone number in email when he sends threats to people. Maybe he'll hang up on you, and you might "sincerely appreciate him hanging up on you", just like he "sincerely appreciated" the owner of the restaurant doing that to him.

This entire situation seems a bit backwards to me. As I read Andy Johnston's letter, I gather that 1) Trip hung up on Andy. 2) Andy thought this was rude. 3) Andy has a lot of friends in SF that use yelp. 4) Andy is going to tell his friends "how [Trip] treated [Andy] as well as [Andy's] feelings about the people who run Sauce."

While this is unprofessional to say the least, I see no extortion or anything like it all as the wording states that this recourse is based on a past event and is not contingent on Trip's future actions at all. Also it is everyone's right to tell their friends if they think a place or a person sucks, that's part of what friends are for. And Andy doesn't say that he's going to write a bad review or have his friends write a bad review, he just says that he's going to tell his friends how Trip treated him. That doesn't mean that his friends will necessarily write reviews for him and because of that there is no guarantee of harm in any way.

What's most interesting to me about this whole situation (and the part that seems backwards) is the Trip's way of dealing with this. So okay, a Groupon employee wrote an angry letter to a restaurant owner that was 100% unprofessional and was probably understood by the restaurant owner to be a threat of defamation by the Andy's network of friends. Trip's response? To publicly post the letters to Facebook along with the Andy's name, cell phone number and other contact information so that everyone else that doesn't like Andy's immature letter can call him any time of the day to tell him how much of a jerk he is? It seems a bit much.

Trip's response letter was well written and had good advice but I believe it should have ended there. By making this whole thing public, Trip is really acting no more mature than Andy was when he wrote the offending letter. Not to mention that it could open Trip up to legal liability as I believe California has laws regarding the publication of private facts (e.g. Andy's cell phone number). Either way, I think this whole situation demonstrates a lot of immaturity on both sides.