10

From a Whisper to a Global Shout

Today we are in the unique position of having to deal with a louder, faster, and more prolific communication channel for consumers who feel they have been wronged: the Internet. John Prescott Ellis, former media columnist with the Boston Globe, wrote what has become the most compelling statement about the Internet in today’s world: “The internet changes everything it touches, and it touches almost everything.”¹ It certainly touches how people complain. Any complaint posted on the Web is accessible to anyone sitting in front of a computer that is connected to the Internet. If you haven’t seen what is happening with complaints on the Web, we implore you to invest an hour of your time and get a little taste of what is there. Peter Blackshaw, CEO of Planetfeedback, says, “The Internet is one of the world’s most powerful focus groups.”² And it’s there for you to sit in on.

The scope of the World Wide Web lets people communicate with each other in a way never before imaginable: prolifically, globally, and pretty much anonymously. A new software package on the market generates an automatic complaint letter that can be sent online or in hard copy. All a user has to do is enter his or her name and answer a few basic questions, and the program creates an angry, coherent complaint letter from an extensive database of words and phrases. Each time it is used, an entirely different letter is produced. The damage caused by talk among a few fellow commuters standing at a bus stop in no way compares to the damage that a single irate consumer can perpetuate on the Internet. In today’s world of video cameras, information highways, and instantaneous communication, it really is impossible to hide bad service. Market researchers believe that the traditional methodologies used to gather customer opinions are changing. Surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews are being replaced with chat rooms, blogs, message boards, and online forums.³ The world has definitely changed.

We’ve organized this chapter to make the point that while you can’t ignore the Internet and what is uploaded onto it, our focus needs to be about what can be done. We are convinced that you aren’t entirely defenseless against this mountain of easily shared opinion.

Opinion Is Everywhere, and It’s Very Creative and Engaging

Don’t think it’s all ranting on the Web. A lot of Web sites are working at being civil. MassLive.com hosts a number of forums. The “wine & dine” forum has a lot of activity on it: people living in Massachusetts post information, ask questions, and by and large keep each other informed about where to eat, where to get great beer, what’s open, what’s not.⁴ Many U.S. states have lists of this type, as do several other countries. YellowPages.com also enables any visitor to its site to rate restaurants.

But even “civil” Web sites allow people to share their negative experiences. The outrageous examples are always entertaining to read, but entry after entry of just “ordinary” bad service comments can put a serious dent in business at a retail store, hotel, hospital, or restaurant.

While you are exploring the Web, enter a phrase such as “a terrible hotel” and see what comes up on the various search engines. Most of the comments are very interesting, and by reading less than one paragraph in many cases, you get to imagine someone’s stay at a bad hotel, the disgust they experienced, and the wish that they had read reviews before showing up. More and more people are becoming savvy about going online and reading what others have said before making a reservation at a hotel they know nothing about. It’s like one gigantic dinner-table conversation. It’s hard to understand why smaller, less well-known hotels that are so thoroughly slammed don’t make some changes to avoid this type of feedback. Equally hard to understand is why big international chains don’t do something about the bad feedback received by hotels that carry their name.

Here’s one comment about a British hotel: “This is a very terrible hotel. The rooms are ok but service is totally crap. We asked to pay a supplement for the traditional English breakfast. The Restaurant Manager came to say that if we were not satisfied with their breakfast, he would pay for our breakfast outside and asked us to get out. He said that in a very very rude manner and claimed that we were not his guest but the hotel’s guest. He was also shouting that we should get out from his restaurant if we were not happy?!!!! Reported him to the Hotel’s General Manager but got no decent apologies. We were treated with no respect. Please don’t use this hotel.”⁵ If you saw this review before booking a room at this hotel, would you make a reservation? This type of review can have a huge impact on people’s purchasing behavior.

It used to be that reviews about restaurants, movies, theatres, cars, car repair services, clothing—you name it—were done by professional reviewers.⁶ The professionals still do that, but today you can read “real” people’s comments about real experiences. (Many people wonder if, in fact, restaurant reviewers get special treatment.) Enter “a terrible restaurant” into Google and you’ll get 1,920 hits as of early 2008; you’ll get 8,180 for “a terrible hotel.” Then enter the name of a restaurant or a hotel and see what kinds of reviews or other entries are available.

It used to be that when people traveled by car, they made sure they had a road map with them. Now people go to the Internet and print out a travel road map for themselves, or they use a GPS device in their car. It’s getting to the point that most people who regularly spend time on computers instantly think of the Internet as a place to get information for everything, and we do mean everything. It has become a habit to go to one of the big search engines and type in various combinations of words to get an answer to a question from the billions and billions of pages of information available to us all. The Pew Internet and American Life Project surveyed American use of the Internet and concludes that 78 percent of adults use the Internet to research products (February–March 2007 survey), with 88 percent from the eighteen to twenty-nine age group.⁷

Hila Etzion, professor at the University of Michigan, has looked at both positive and negative reviews of retail sites and concludes after a six-year study of online electronic product sites that negative ratings definitely impact sales.⁸ Dr. Etzion points out that a certain volume needs to be reached for the public to take the complaints as valid. The message for organizations: read what is being said about you. Just because a complaint is not presented in writing on the form your business demands doesn’t mean there’s no complaint. In effect, all these Web sites give businesses an opportunity to sit in on semiprivate conversations about them. We’ve always said that one of the reasons why a complaint is a gift is that the customer is saying it to you so you can do something about it. All these conversations on the Net are giving you this opportunity as well.

A lot of these Web sites are very interesting. Tom Hespos, president of Underscore Marketing, indicates that most comments on the Web are not off-the-wall statements. He says that there are definitely some “drive-by shootings” revealed by phrases such as “this company sucks.” But most people of this type, he argues, “who leave valueless comments are quickly ostracized by online communities . . . the people who get value [from your Web site] will shout down the haters quickly. More often than you’ll hear from the haters, you’ll get people posting details of interactions they’ve had with your company. You will hear from people about why they had a bad experience.”⁹ You can even find Web sites where job interviewees post their comments about the experience of being interviewed at a particular company. Some of these comments are not pretty, and names of the interviewers are listed.¹⁰

There is no question that some people will go way out of their way to create a message that is so compelling, it’s guaranteed to be passed around the world and read with a great deal of interest. Years ago, a customer created a slide show about a very terrible hotel experience. The customer has since asked that it not be passed around any longer. However, it can still be found on the Internet.¹¹ It’s generated such intense interest that a formal academic study was conducted on the four thousand unsolicited e-mails that the slide show creator received.¹² One consequence of putting something up on the Internet is that it’s very difficult to get it completely out of circulation later. The original customer feels that the hotel has suffered enough, especially since the general manager put a lot of focus on customer service after the bad service had been exposed.¹³

The slide show on the very terrible hotel inspired someone to create a similar slide show about American Airlines called “Yours Is a Very Terrible Airline.” It’s extremely well done and no doubt will enjoy as long a shelf life as the “original.” The creator writes in a comment to remarks about the show, “American Airlines finally contacted me (after I e-mailed the presentation and sent a CD labeled “FOR TRAINING PURPOSES”) to apologize profusely and provide round trip airline tickets. Nevertheless—traveler be warned!”¹⁴

The Better Business Bureau receives 1.7 million requests annually for information about companies. Consumers check on the reliability of specific businesses before they make a purchase. (The industry that gets the most requests for information is the insurance industry.)¹⁵ To a certain degree, a Web site like the Better Business Bureau’s is similar to eBay, which has a remarkable ability to control quality for both buyers and sellers. Each time a purchase is made on eBay, the buyer and the seller have the opportunity to rate each other. This is important because you have almost zero recourse if you think you are buying a Prada bag on eBay and end up getting a fake made in China. If the seller wants to continue selling on eBay, complaints of fakes will dry up business immediately.

The BBB threatened to expel Kodak from membership for refusing to respond to customer complaints in 2007. As a result, Kodak discontinued its membership. Bloggers have taken up the story and have invited comments. As the bloggers say, “This is not a Kodak moment.”¹⁶ We would add, it’s definitely not seeing complaints as gifts.

The important takeaway from examples of this type is that everyone in a company needs to be aware of the power of the Internet. Service providers may think they are invisible to the rest of the world as they stand behind their check-in counters or talk with someone on the telephone, but in fact the Internet can easily expose anyone. It might be a good idea for organizations to show the two slide shows mentioned as examples of what can happen when customers are treated poorly. In both cases, the customers were, without question, wronged.

Many product problems are first identified on the Internet. Intel Corporation’s chip problem in the mid-1990s was, in fact, first discussed on the Internet before it created a media splash. The unfavorable publicity forced Intel to backtrack on its initial position of ignoring a small computing problem caused by the Pentium chip. PC Week, the widely read weekly computer magazine, posed a question at the time of Intel’s notoriety: “While we engage in a lot of discussion over whether the Internet is ready for business, maybe we should be asking if business is ready for the Internet.”¹⁷ Customers used to complain in a somewhat orderly, private manner. Not anymore.

We know some organizations that are so befuddled by what is happening on the Internet that they choose to ignore any comments written there. It’s definitely an option. But if something splashes big in the media, the impact can be considerable. No one is defenseless—individuals or corporations. Let us remind you again that if you start with the philosophy that complaints are gifts, you’ll have more bravery to check what’s actually being written about you. In our humble opinion, the Internet is simply too big to ignore. We offer three suggestions that can be easily remembered if you don’t mind using the common acronym MPG (miles per gallon). In this case M stands for monitor, P is pretense, and G is guidance. It’s yes to monitoring and guidance and a definite no to pretense.

M: Say Yes to Monitoring

Any large corporation should have someone who regularly monitors what is being written about it. Intuit ran into a problem with one of its software programs, TurboTax. Certain features annoyed users, and they wrote to online forums threatening a boycott. Intuit was able to quickly integrate the feedback, make changes, and solve the problem by making changes in TurboTax.¹⁸ Since then, Intuit has been regularly monitoring the Internet, believing it’s well worth the effort. Scott Gulbransen, a spokesperson for Intuit, acknowledges, “Many people don’t like to call and complain.” And if you see one entry about a product, it’s very tempting to add your own comment that agrees with the writer’s.¹⁹

With a little sleuthing you can find all the Web sites that mention your company name. You can set up a Google alert so that every time a certain phrase is found on the Internet, Google will forward it to you. If you are part of a well-known brand, you want to be careful about how you ask for information because you can be inundated if your brand name is frequently mentioned. Several software programs can help. One scans 1 million blogs, one hundred thousand message boards, and six thousand traditional media sources. If a company releases a new product, any of these programs can track immediately what is being said online.

Apple Computer was getting trashed in blogs about its iPod batteries in late 2004. Apple quickly made some changes to save the brand—though still not quickly enough to avoid massive Internet conversations and a class-action suit.²⁰ Blogs are extremely important to monitor because they are opinionated conversations being conducted in cyberspace. The people who get to hear these conversations aren’t just those who were invited to sit at a dinner table. Anyone who comes across them on the Web gets a seat, can link the conversation to his or her own Web site, and can e-mail a copy of the blog to many people. It’s almost overwhelming, but monitoring helps.

A few years ago, Janelle met a man in the United Kingdom who had developed a very nifty device to let companies see how customers reacted to service while talking with someone in a call center. Customers could at any point push a telephone number (from one to ten) indicating how they felt about how the conversation was going. This is real-time evaluation—incredibly valuable for any company if you adopt the philosophy that a complaint is a gift. Janelle was excited and asked how sales were going. The man told her that he couldn’t sell any of them. When companies watched how customers evaluated them in demonstrations, they said there was no way that the ratings were legitimate. They were simply too low. This is probably the feeling that many organizations have when they read all the negative comments about them, their service, and their products. “It can’t be!” But it is. And to deny it would be the equivalent of early Americans’ refusal to place their ears to the ground to hear distant hoofbeats. The sounds or silence provided valuable clues as to what to do next, and no one would ever have thought about cutting off this source of information.

Many Web sites attempt to keep communication within a specific group of people, but anyone with a computer and an electronic communication connection can read what has been written. It’s very easy to become a member of most Web sites. At the Web site for members of the Starbucks Workers Union, many comments are about bad working conditions. People make both positive and negative statements about the union, the host of the site. Customer complaints are discussed, and the range of opinion is diverse. Certainly someone at the corporate offices of Starbucks is avidly reading this Web site.

We know of one financial information company that has taken monitoring perhaps a step too far. Whenever this organization finds anything negative about it on the Web, it threatens legal action. When word gets out about this behavior, the company won’t look honest; it’ll appear to be stifling independent evaluation. Clearly, the goal here isn’t to eliminate negative feedback; it’s to be aware of it. Shutting it down on the Internet with legal threats doesn’t stop the discussion.

It definitely is possible to learn from complaints on the Web. Jeff Jarvis, whose blog is called BuzzMachine, has had an enormous impact on Dell Computers. BusinessWeek’s lead story in August 2005 was about Dell and Jarvis.²¹ Jarvis wrote an open letter to Dell’s CEO Michael Dell, “The bottom line is that a low-price coupon may have gotten me to buy a Dell, but your product was a lemon, and your customer service was appalling.” Dell got some moments of fame after customers started putting photos and videos on the Web of their laptops exploding when batteries malfunctioned. After a second BusinessWeek lead story, Jarvis is now singing Dell’s praises, saying that the company has seen the value in listening and ceding control to customers. Jarvis writes, “In the age of customers empowered by blogs and social media, Dell has leapt from worst to first.”²² As a result of the Jarvis impact, Dell committed $100 million to improving its sales and support activity.²³

The airlines appear to have decided to ignore Web sites where customers pour out their souls about the way they have been treated. Almost everyone seems to agree that complaining on airline-related Web sites does little for the complainers except perhaps to enable them to vent. Several complaints about U.S.-based airlines (for example, at Untied.com for United Airlines, and at NorthworstAir.org for Northwest) are painful to read, though we suspect that most people don’t believe that the airlines do awful things to everyone and that they all hope to escape the same horrid treatment. A spokesman for Northwest Airlines, Jon Austin, admits, “We don’t monitor those sites. If someone has a legitimate gripe with us, the best thing to do is to come to us directly.”²⁴

For companies that do monitor such sites, if they see an aired complaint that somehow never made it to someone who would do something about it (this happens all too frequently in large corporations, where the customer is sent a scripted, generic apology, and that’s it), they can contact the customer and minimize the damage. Companies that monitor the Web may find a large number of customers who are so introverted that complaining online is the easiest way for them to complain. Companies may find a whole group of customers talking that would never talk to them in the past.²⁵ These customers can be brought into direct communication with the organization.

P: Say No to Pretense

While you may be tempted to go online anonymously and defend your organization or in some way try to influence the market, it’s a definite no. The problem is in getting caught. In this sense, it’s no different from the temptation to cook your books when your numbers look bad. Let’s look at one example that is not too extreme but very embarrassing for a top-notch company that had no need to engage in this type of behavior.

John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, posted statements between 1999 and 2006 under the name Rahodeb (an anagram of his wife’s name, Deborah). He went a long time without getting caught, but most would argue that it was inevitable he would. Mostly he praised Whole Foods and attacked rivals, including Wild Oats, which Whole Foods was in the process of buying. Because of the company’s acquisition intentions, many wonder whether the postings were illegal, if not unethical. Apparently, other senior executives within the company knew what Mackey was doing. The Wall Street Journal finally outed Mackey’s activities, and the Whole Foods Market board reacted by barring any postings made anonymously by employees on behalf of the company.²⁶

When you read a collection of Mackey’s comments, you have to wonder whether his purpose was to influence the market (he posted messages in Yahoo Finance stock forums) and that in the process he violated rules by sharing information that would be considered insider information. Here are a couple of his comments:

• On a new Whole Foods line: “Their new 365 Organic label has great packaging and great products in my personal experience. Their salad dressings which you criticize I particularly like. Have you had the 365 Organic Miso dressing? It’s my personal favorite.”

• On the possibility of a buyout in March 2002: “Would Whole Foods ever sell out to another company? Probably not as long as Mackey is running the company. The company seems pretty committed to being independent.”²⁷

At one point he claims to be George W. Bush and finishes his posting by saying it doesn’t really matter who he is. When someone states that he is really John Mackey, he denies it by saying that the idea seems pretty far-fetched. There’s something glaringly dishonest in these postings, especially referring to himself in the third person while writing under a pseudonym. As a result of this activity, Mackey was named a loser CEO by the Wall Street Journal. On this news, one reader commented: “If assuming a pseudonym that you use to trumpet your own praises, defend your haircut, and call yourself cute on a Yahoo business messageboard are not all clear signs of being a loser, I do not know what is.”²⁸

This story will play itself out in the months to come, but damage has been done to the organic grocer’s reputation. The Federal Trade Commission is attempting to block Whole Foods’ acquisition of Wild Oats, claiming it would eliminate competition in the organic food market. The FTC is using these blogs as evidence that the merger shouldn’t be allowed to go through. The Whole Foods Declaration of Interdependence states, “Our ability to instill a clear sense of interdependence among our various stakeholders is contingent upon our efforts to communicate more often, more openly, and more compassionately. Better communication equals better understanding and more trust.” For six years, “better communication” was not happening, and now Whole Foods is going to have to deal with this whopper from their CEO. At a minimum, it’s going to make customers wonder if the company is gouging customers and if its so-called organic vegetables and fruits really are organic after all.

It’s too dangerous to do anything that could ruin the reputation of a well-established and well-loved organization. Specifically, it’s not a good idea to assign staff the responsibility of finding negative comments about your organization on the Web and then have them write something positive without indicating they are from your organization. At some point, one of these people might become disgruntled and reveal that he or she was forced to write positive statements about the company. Remember that the Web is a place for conversation, and if someone were lying to your face, you wouldn’t appreciate it. Any hint of pretence or fabrication is not good on the Web, where conversations can stay posted for years.

G: Say Yes to Guidance

One of the most effective ways to take the Complaint Is a Gift philosophy and apply it to the Internet is to engage in real conversations with customers. These can be guided to your own Web site. A number of major companies have set up blog councils, including Microsoft, Dell, Cisco, Coca-Cola, Nokia, Wells Fargo, and General Motors. Jeff Jarvis in his BuzzMachine blog is clear that if these giant corporations treat their blogs as public relations devices, they will probably fail. Jarvis sees a blog as a conversation. Alec Saunders, former Microsoft manager, gives this advice: “Good heavens, people! Get a grip! You don’t need a cozy little exclusive club to figure out what to do with blogs. Just get on the net, start talking to your customers and advocates, and start interacting with people outside the strictures of twentieth century command and control marketing. Council, Shmouncil.”²⁹

People who are communicating on the Net subscribe to the manifestos outlined in The Cluetrain Manifesto, a book that was a call to action for modern businesses operating in an electronically connected marketplace.³⁰ However you might feel about that book, the first three manifestos are relevant to how organizations might best converse with customers on the Internet.

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

This means that you can’t guide your customers to a Web site that is anything less than a real conversation. Customers in their blogs, in comments to blogs, or on Web sites designed to create an electronic conversation can alert companies to problems in the same way they can do this with verbal complaints. Just as customers in person ask companies, “Why don’t you . . . ?” they now do it on the Internet—except their conversations are being listened in on by thousands of people. Seventy-eight percent of bloggers say they read blogs, and 31 percent consider them to be credible sources.³¹

Organizations can help guide this traffic to a few locations instead of being spread all across the Net, where admittedly it is difficult to monitor. One way to do this is through a blog on your own Web site. What the bloggers above seem to be saying is that you can’t treat this like a public relations or marketing exercise. You have to carry on a conversation as if you were there—live—with that person, not so different from a live complaint coming at you fast and furious.

Here’s how Lionel Menchaca, a Dell blogger, describes what happened at Dell: “Probably the best time to launch a blog is when things aren’t going so well. We started monitoring the blogosphere [in 2006]. At our worst point, almost 50% of the commentary was negative. That made it easy for us to decide to jump in. These negative conversations were happening with or without us, and it was pretty clear we had a better chance if we entered those negative discussions. Today, we’re seeing about 23% negative. While that’s moving in the right direction, there’s plenty of progress to be made.”³² Dell bloggers aren’t the only ones who think the company has turned the corner on this. General agreement in the press is that Dell’s uncharacteristic swiftness in its admitting missteps has resulted in its ability to address complaints.³³

Organizations can guide communication to their own Web sites in several ways. These include writing blogs, providing information that is available only on your Web site, and setting up conversations or live chats with members of your staff. Organizations can provide incentives to get consumers to provide reviews (hopefully good ones), as it seems that having numerous favorable reviews of a company and the quality of its products impacts sales positively.³⁴

Once customers are at your Web site, make it easy for them to navigate. Ask every single employee to spend time at the company’s Web site and then take all their feedback and improve what customers are experiencing. Make sure your toll-free number (if you want people to call you) is on every single page of your site. Don’t hide it several clicks away from your home page. Take a look at www.Zappos.com and you’ll see one of the rare Web sites where the 800 number is prominently displayed on every page.

Make it easy for customers to find out where to provide feedback. Some companies hide their feedback pages, perhaps because they are afraid of a storm of complaints. They also may avoid using the word complaint. Other labels commonly used for feedback pages include “customer service management,” “accounts reconciliation,” or even “information hotline.” Jagdip Singh, at Case Western Reserve University, believes that it should be obvious to consumers where to go when they have complaints.³⁵ Someone who is already alienated from the marketplace is not likely to recognize that “customer service management” is the place to lodge a complaint. Some Web sites use a combination of words for their feedback pages, such as “Complaints, Compliments, and Complications” (or “Challenges” or “Confusion”). Such a phrase enables customers to complain but to categorize their problems as complications. Remember, customers don’t like to see themselves as complainers.