Companies need to understand and manage the rising threat of online public complaining. There is ample incentive, because the best ways to respond, and to prevent complaints from recurring, apply not just to the Internet.
After finding his guitar badly damaged through United Air Lines’ baggage handling, and after enduring
nine months of fruitless attempts to secure restitution from the company, an exhausted customer retaliated by posting a YouTube video about his misadventure. A year later, the video has become viral and generated more than 9 million hits. This musician’s course of action is but one example of a bona fide
movement; and not only is online public complaining becoming more prevalent, this form of customer
response could also be very costly for companies. So what can companies do to deal with online complainers? Based on their eight years of research, the authors summarize their understanding of this phenomenon and provide actionable recommendations. They organize their conclusions into a two-bytwo
matrix. First, the matrix’s rows differentiate between (1) understanding complainers’ motives and
behaviors and (2) recommendations whereby offending companies may change those behaviors. Second,
the matrix’s columns distinguish between the before and after of the online complaints, as motives and
behaviors change over time. The authors’ recommendations highlight how companies can prevent, or at
least reduce, online complaining, and how companies should respond after an online complaint happens
anyway. In particular, they show that the best way to avoid the triggers of online complaining is to
develop fair processes and a triage system for initial non-online complaints. Also, they show that companies should respond to online complaints as quickly as possible–in any case, no later than four
weeks after the online complaint posting–and that the nature of the apology should depend on the
type of customer involved.
4 Comments On: When Unhappy Customers Strike Back on the Internet
Great article! Fully in sync of what I am action researching and working on for now 14 years now. In 2008 while visiting the entrepreneurial management school Team Academy up in Jyväskylä, Finland, I started the blog TheServiceRevolution.
The intention originally was developed with the students up there to install a platform where customers could share their personal customer service related stories namely about companies. As the notion of Team Academy is to provide value for customers (companies in this case) it was intented to provide companies with real stories about their (often unknown) bad customer service and so get in touch with them working on transforming the bad experience into truly exceptionally excellent service.
Running almost two and a half years now, only lately further interest arose. The initial story about a train trip to Brussels, four hours delayed, missing a business appointment, getting no refund nor improvement of service (as I got mentioned by frequent travellers).
So customer service is still something that is not at all valued in the right sense by management. Often the “customer service” is outsourced to a service provider and the KPIs to measure him is only the number of tickets (so it seems). Otherwise it does not make sense to see the problems of the same kind over and over again.
Glad you put the topic into a broader audience so conversation about it can fuel up
Cheers, and let’s get in touch in doing some follow up action research
Ralf
Unlike John Belushi’s fraternity which gets placed on double secret probation in National Lampoon’s Animal House, companies today know full well when they have breached the perceived rules of client-company relationships. Without the veil of secrecy, companies today must elevate their products, processes, and support mechanisms to prevent problems in the first place. Failing those essentials, they must formulate and implement effective strategies to recover after the fact. http://bit.ly/hg1knu
right now, the customer is our boss. not company pays our salary, but our customer
Every company needs to be extremely alive to proper handling of customer complaints even those which may on the face appear to be trivial. Yes, no complaint is too minor to be ignored. This subject must be handled at a fairly senior level and each and every complaint must be handled in depth to ensure redressal without delay. If possible, the complainant could be contacted over phone/personally, this,however,keeping in view the perceived hurt the action/incident would have caused to the customer.Empathy is most important. It is not enough ( as in the broken guitar case ) to tell the customer rules do not permit compensation. That being so, the matter should get referred to the top management may be even to the Board and and satisfactory via media arrived at.Hurt emotions cannot get healed by providing untested medication.
A point to be kept in mind while talking to a harrassed customer. No anger, extreme humility for as one customer expressed ” The tongue has no bones but it can break bones ! ”
As a proactive measure for guarding against occurance of similar type of complaints, the company must maintain a dossier of the complaints received and their disposal which could be shared to prevent repetitions as far as possible.
Kapil Sopory