Last week I blogged about my frustration with Wedding Wire’s extremely unclear way of determining their Bride’s Choice Awards. I said in that blog that I cancelled my account for other reasons that I would expand upon in another blog, this is that blog.

My issues over all with online reviews is that 3^rd party reviewing sites like Yelp and Wedding Wire sadly don’t offer a very fair way for vendors to represent themselves. In the case of Yelp, I can say anything about anyone for any reason and they will publish it. They then have a mysterious algorithm that no one has a clue of how it works even the sales people at Yelp. Some of the reviews are published and others are filtered. There have been hundreds of news exposes about the legitimacy of Yelp.

Wedding Wire’s only criteria for a review is that the reviewer can supply a contract to them. If you have a contract, you can say anything you want about the vendor regardless of if it is true or not. It is your opinion and Wedding Wire is only publishing your opinion.

We all make mistakes. We are human. The way that you choose to handle your mistakes is what takes you from being a business to being an amazing business.

My originally assigned sales representative from Wedding Wire was Stephanie Minton.  As a sales representative, she was horrible. She never returned phone calls, never returned emails, and never completed anything that she promised unless you sat on her to do it repeatedly. She always had a “The dog ate my homework excuse.” I finally had enough and emailed Wedding Wire asking to have her replaced as my sales representative.

 My new sales representative was Rosie Kalonaros. I had no problems with her. The few times I needed anything she was great to work with.

In September of 2012, I attended the American Disc Jockey Association’s national conference and a mutual friend introduced me to Sonny Ganguly. Sonny was aware of whom I was through mutual friends and that I produced bridal shows in Chicago. At the conference, he suggested that Wedding Wire sponsor our bridal shows. I asked him what he was looking for from me and what Wedding Wire could offer me. We were able to offer him exposure at our bridal shows to our brides as well as to our vendors and Wedding Wire would send broadcast email blasts to their brides letting them know that our bridal shows existed and had promo codes for complimentary tickets. An agreement was drawn up by Wedding Wire, emailed over to me, reviewed and signed by me immediately and we were now proud to have both The Knot and Wedding Wire as sponsors of our shows while our direct competitor had neither. We announced this new sponsorship to the Chicago wedding market with excitement. On November 28, 2012 I received an email from Christina Fields saying that they could not sponsor our shows due to the fact that the emails that were promised to us in the agreement drawn up by them had been “accidentally” sold. Upon further investigating, they conveniently but “accidently” had been sold to my direct bridal show competitor. This was almost a month after we had signed our agreement with Wedding Wire. I didn’t even get the decency of a phone call from Sonny it was in an email from someone else. Naturally I was upset and called and emailed Sonny wanting to know how and why this happened. He claimed it was an “accident”. If this is the truth, clearly Wedding Wire has internal issues so much so that they can’t keep track of a simple email campaign schedule. If it isn’t the truth, they simply took my competitor’s money and dumped us. In my mind they were either greedy or incompetent.  I will let you decide for yourself, either way is not good sadly.

Through a series of discussions with mutual friends and directly, Sonny offered to do a few email campaigns to promote my shows at no charge and wanting nothing in return. I was confused now because they all of a sudden had dates available to promote my show when a week earlier they didn’t.  I took them up on their offer regardless.  

 I received an email on Friday December 15 in the afternoon asking for all of my materials for the email campaign with no notice for an email to go out Monday morning. Apparently Wedding Wire doesn’t know that wedding vendors work on weekends. We got them everything and Monday the campaign went out promoting our upcoming shows. It went out to 4700 brides in Chicago compared to The Knot’s list of 40,000. I received 4 brides that used the promo code in the email for complimentary tickets.

I shared this with Christina and her response was that perhaps the email could have had a better more direct landing page. Please visit www.windycityweddingshow.com to reference what is next. The only logical page for the email to land on is our homepage. Clearly Christina had never taken the time to even look at our website and was simply using a generic excuse that I can only assume she uses with other clients. Since I hadn’t paid anything for the email campaign, I could only laugh internally knowing  that our direct bridal show competitor ran out to buy these campaigns away from me and was now spending all of his money on a campaign that would draw him nothing.

My next issue was a few weeks later when I saw all of the posts on Facebook from friends who had won the Bride’s Choice Awards and I called my sales representative Rosie to inquire about what happened that we didn’t win. Sadly she had no idea at all. She didn’t know any of the criteria for winning.  If you haven’t read my Bride’s Choice blog yet, you can by clicking in this link.

http://keithchristopher.com/blog/entry/wedding-wire-s-bride-s-choice-awards-not-really-much-of-a-choice.html

Once again I found myself upset and disappointed with Wedding Wire. Sonny Ganguly and I once again went back and forth about the way that Wedding Wire has treated me over all. In an email that I sent him before we spoke on the phone, I asked him to be ready to answer one very simple question.

“Based on the way that I have been repeatedly treated by Wedding Wire, how would you feel if you were me?”

Sonny never answered the question. He said, "I thought it was rhetorical." I told him it wasn’t and asked him to answer the simple question. He again chose not to. The most frustrating about everything that I have had to deal with Wedding Wire and Sonny Ganguly is simple; Wedding Wire made mistake after mistake and never once simply came clean and simply sincerely apologized. It apparently isn’t in their company culture since no one I have ever dealt with there has ever apologized.

There are always three parts to any apology. It starts with the words “I’m sorry” It then shifts to the acknowledgement of knowing that their actions have caused you pain, frustration, hurt, etc. The third part is reconciliation that we want to do something to make it right and in this learning process can assure you that it will never happen again.

I asked Sonny to remove The Keith Christopher Entertainment Group completely from Wedding Wire. I have really good reviews. He told me that he could cancel the account but could not remove me from Wedding Wire. He explained that the brides who reviewed me owned the reviews and not Wedding Wire. I pointed out the fact that I owned my company name and at this point that they are using it without my permission. My attorney now is looking into the legal ways to remove it. We all know it is simple HTML code and can be removed without any issue. 

He once again offered to finish the email campaigns. He offered to refund two months of advertising. I just want everything about and regarding Wedding Wire to go away and I want KCE to be removed from their website.  I want everyone reading this to also know that I am not mad. I am frustrated and I want this to be finished. Sonny clearly chooses not to listen to his customers. I was and am willing to walk away from his complimentary email campaigns. I never asked him for a refund. I will take the refund as I feel that just my time alone trying to end this deserves the financial compensation. I will then simply reinvest my Wedding Wire budget elsewhere.  

I just read an interview with Timothy Chi, the CEO of Wedding Wire where he explained the four most important success factors. #2 was carefully listening to the customer. Apparently Tim needs to hold a company meeting. 

In Sonny’s final email to me he wrote, “I wanted to once again say that we‘re sorry for the frustration you have had with your account.“ Sadly he just doesn’t get it. He should be sorry for the repeated mistakes, lies, incompetence, poor service, and bad choices made by himself and his staff with the way that he has treated a paying customer. The really sad part is that I have been overwhelmed by the amount of people who have commented on my blog, social media pages and groups saying the exact same thing.  

But just like the people that review vendors on Wedding Wire, that’s just my opinion.

I know a lot of you reading this wonder why I am blogging about this at all. I am doing it because people need to know what my experience was with Wedding Wire so that they are better informed when they are making their marketing decisions. It is a very competitive world out there and brides are looking for value more than ever before. You need to have as much information as possible when spending your hard earned marketing dollars.

Please Google Wedding Wire Scam or Wedding Wire Better Business Bureau. You will find that Wedding Wire has had 10 complaints filed against them with the BBB. Currently they have disappeared but of you look around you will find them.  If you Google Pissed Off Consumer, they have 14 complaints.

I am clearly not the only one that has not been treated professionally by Wedding Wire.