As the old saying goes: Don't get mad, get even.
And when today's consumers get mad, they get even--online.
The internet has given consumers a quick, easy way to vent about
companies. Just ask Target, which saw sites such as BanTarget.org pop up
when it banned the Salvation Army from collecting donations outside
its stores. Or Microsoft, which has blogs, message boards and
websites that follow its every move.
The American consumer seems to be getting angrier every year.
The Better Business Bureau processed 773,042 complaints in 2003, a
23.5 percent increase from 2002. A random telephone survey of 1,000
households conducted last August, meanwhile, revealed that 73
percent had experienced "customer rage" within the last
year related to their most serious problem with a product or
service--a 5 percent increase over 2003.
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"I continue to be surprised at the level of rage,"
says Scott M. Broetzmann, co-founder of Alexandria, Virginia-based
Customer Care Alliance (CCA), which conducts the annual customer
rage survey in the United States and Great Britain. The 2004 U.S.
study was conducted in conjunction with the Center for Services
Leadership at the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State
University.
Maybe people are hair-trigger angry over the big picture--the
election, the war and the economy. They're also much more
cynical as consumers. A November 2004 Harris Interactive poll of
1,014 Americans found that while fewer Americans reported feeling
alienated in 2004 than in 2003, 53 percent still feel that people
with power will try to take advantage of them. Combine this tension
with internet access, and companies that do dumb things will be
called out a lot quicker, says Pete Snyder, founder and CEO of New
Media Strategies, an Arlington, Virginia, firm that visits blogs,
chat rooms, fan sites and message boards on behalf of corporate
clients to see what people are saying.
Casey Neistat, 24, is one consumer who took his case to
cyberspace when his iPod died in September 2003 and he discovered
Apple didn't offer a replacement battery. "They suggested
I buy a new iPod," Neistat says. Instead, he and brother Van
Neistat, 29--both professional filmmakers--made a short video
including Casey's phone conversation with an Apple customer
service representative. They posted it at iPodsdirtysecret.com and e-mailed 40 friends about the
site, which has now received more than 1.5 million hits. "We
had no idea [the site] would get the attention it did," Casey
says. (Apple, by the way, now has a battery replacement program for
the iPod.)
Of course, consumers need a story to tell when their fingers hit
the keyboard, and companies keep giving them fresh material.
Companies' obsession with managing cost per customer
contact--in the form of time limits on phone calls, "voice
jail" systems and so on--has decreased the quality of customer
service, says Broetzmann. In fact, CCA's research found that
consumers with a problem were more likely to cite "lost
time" (57 percent) than "lost money" (36 percent) in
association with their most serious problem.
The increase in online complaining presents a threat to
companies, but it's also an opportunity to get unfiltered
consumer feedback they couldn't get a decade ago. "Smart
companies are looking at the internet to see what their potential
customers and their current customers are saying," Snyder
says.
Many companies, however, are still struggling to master the
basics. A full 56 percent of respondents in the CCA study said they
received nothing in response to their complaints about their most
serious problem. But when asked what they wanted, nonmonetary
actions such as an explanation, an apology and getting a chance to
vent ranked ahead of a refund. "The things they wanted most
after getting the product or service fixed don't cost a
dime," Broetzmann says. With a little thought, settling scores
with customers--and staying out of angry consumers'
blogs--might not be so hard for companies after all.