Johan Conradie, Manager of Customer Care, BMW South Africa, gets hold of me

This morning, after the rude, unprofessional, and unacceptable encounter with Ryan Barwell, Dealer Principal of BMW Sandton Auto, I called their Customer Care line twice.

The first time was from Ryan's office. But Johan wasn't in the office at that point.

The second call was just after 8am while I was sitting in my car in the parking lot at the dealership. I spoke to someone at Johan's office -- Princess -- who told me that Johan was on a conference call, and that she would pass the message on.

In the interim, I blogged about Ryan's awful 'service', and tweeted about it.

There seems to be a serious amount of buzz around this particular topic, with loads of retweets, and vigorous response from people.

One of the people who responded included @GuyKilfoil in the tweet. He's the Director of Communications for BMW South Africa. And he got back to me super-fast. He'd already followed my Twitter account (@RoyBlumenthal) before I was even aware that he was in the loop.

He tweeted me from a conference, saying that someone would get back to me pronto. That was at about 11:10am. Sure enough, Johan Conradie phoned at around 11:25am.

What's curious about the call is that I assumed he was responding to the message I'd left with Princess. And I asked him if that was the case. He said, 'No, I didn't get the message. Guy Kilfoil asked me to call you.'

Which means that my message didn't rise above the surface. It took social media to get a response. The good old fashioned 'leave a message' didn't crack it.