CHAPTER NINE

The World Has Changed—Internet Complaints

A new generation of consumers is shopping and complaining, and these young adults are different from their parents or grandparents. They are different because they are increasing their use of electronic media and even prefer using the internet to complain. Every passing day, customers and businesses alike have greater availability to the internet. It’s a more accessible, louder, and more prolific communication channel to complain on if customers feel they’ve been wronged or give praise if they are satisfied. It has undoubtedly changed how people complain—and depending on when and where the complaint lands, thousands of people can read those complaints. John Prescott Ellis, the former media columnist with the Boston Globe, stands by his compelling statement about the internet in today’s world: “The internet changes everything it touches, and it touches almost everything.”¹

The Internet Impact

For negative reviewers, complaining online is a lot like a drive-by shooting. Complainers don’t have to deal with a live person standing in front of them, so they feel free to blast away on social media sites. In addition, if celebrities complain via Twitter, a single tweet—or a YouTube or TikTok video—can be viewed by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people in less than twenty-four hours. Because of how they were treated, if celebrities support a political cause, their request for people to boycott a business can do considerable damage.

Most customer-facing staff have little to do with online complaints unless they communicate via chat boxes. But CSRs need to understand that every face-to-face complaint not adequately resolved may end up on general platforms or websites. In that sense, even though the person first talking with disgruntled customers may have no idea that comments about their exchange will be posted online, the whole CSR team is affected by these reviews.

On the other hand, some companies have experienced accelerated growth almost overnight because of a good review by celebrities. After noticing some early morning positive comments by a well-known person about a product, I waited to order it until the evening hours. By the time I got to Amazon, the product was no longer available with no indication when it would be back in stock. In less than eight hours, the product had been sold out.

As Stephen Hawking commented, “We are all now connected by the internet, like neurons in a giant brain.”² If you haven’t seen what is happening with complaints on the web, invest an hour and get a taste of Stephen Hawking’s giant-brain phenomenon. Peter Blackshaw, CEO of Planetfeed, said, “The internet is one of the world’s most powerful focus groups.” And, it’s there for you to sit in on.³

Other businesses have been devastated by public commentary. The damage caused by talk among a few fellow commuters standing next to a bus stop in no way compares to the damage a single irate consumer can perpetuate today on the internet. In today’s world of video and smartphone cameras, information highways, and instantaneous communication, it is difficult to hide inadequate services or products that don’t deliver what was promised.

The Internet Is a Rapidly Evolving Infant

Today’s market researchers believe the traditionally used methodologies to collect and analyze customer opinions have and will continue to change. Surveys, focus groups, and one-on-one interviews are being replaced with chat rooms, blogs, message boards, and online forums.⁴ It’s an understatement to say the world has changed. Understanding how these fluctuations to date are simply precursors to what is coming is more relevant. This means whatever advice we read (including in this chapter) is mostly advice for whatever technology exists today.

It doesn’t matter how difficult it is for businesses to adjust to the internet. It exists, and it’s still probably in its infancy. We need to figure out how to live positively with the internet now that the door has been opened. It would be great to have concrete advice relevant today that will cover all the platforms that handle online comments. Unless the wisdom is generally high level, it is almost inevitable that better advice will arrive to address all the realities of comments and complaints on the internet in another few years.

Perhaps an even more critical question is, How many businesses will take today’s advice, follow guidelines that make sense today, and then be willing to change tomorrow? These changes mean that companies need to be particularly agile regarding online complaint handling. Not all organizations are. The critical question for you is, Is your organization agile in this area?

Businesses used to receive and respond to hard-copy letters from complaining customers. Today, they mostly read online critiques and write their comments on the same platforms. Because they are written responses, most companies need to dust off their writing skills to use online in social posts, chat boxes, or emails. They also need to hire talent that can do this quickly and effectively. When written complaints mainly arrived in letter format, most businesses established procedures to guide their written responses. That doesn’t seem to be the case today.

Technological tools are available that help you mirror the tone of the person writing a comment or sending an email, varying your style to match the sender’s. One such tool is called Libretta. It uses patented artificial intelligence to automatically identify what motivates writers and how they think and then make decisions when writing in specific documents. For example, I sent an email to the developer of Libretta. I received the following analysis of my style: “The language that you used indicates a preference to decide for yourself, based on what is important to you, and you do not like to be told what to do.” That absolutely describes me.

Would it be helpful for someone responding to a written complaint or comment by me to know this is my style and use that information to craft a response? For example, a response letter might start with, “Thank you. Based on what you have said is important to you, may I suggest . . .” This opening comment will resonate much better for someone like me than “Let me tell you what you need to do.” The language suggested by Libretta is quite magical, and you can see it demonstrated on our website, AComplaintIsAGift.com.

Consider this survey regarding today’s hotel practices about online reviews. Researchers from Market Metrix, a hospitality customer feedback firm, found some 85 percent of hotels have no guidelines for monitoring and responding to online comments.⁵ Another researcher found the lack of management responses to online reviews happened because, at least in the hospitality industry, managers didn’t know how to respond to a post. Several managers thought three stars out of five was not a negative rating.⁶ Some hospitality companies faced a change in management, and the new management team lacked a basic understanding of working with social media.

Besides knowledge about the importance of online reviews and how to operate in that space, several principles relating to in-person complaint handling can still be helpful in the electronic media age. After all, we know many of the principles and techniques complaint handlers use today with in-person complaints are the same ones that have worked well responding to hard-copy written complaints. Every senior manager needs to keep up on relevant research and see what new strategies and current tools can help deal with this barrage of feedback.

What Big-Data Research Can Teach Us

Would a sample size of twenty million customer responses seem like a significant number to you? It stuns me. That magnitude tells me analyses will change just about everything we know about customer complaint behavior on the internet.

Long posed by the hospitality industry about online reviews, three fundamental questions have been answered by three professors in a Harvard Business Review article. They analyzed more than 20 million online reviews from the big four travel platforms (Orbitz, Hotels.com, Expedia, and Tripadvisor).⁷

These answers were all culled from the travel platforms. The growing field of big-data research about online comments looks for patterns and trends, and twenty million analyses of online reviews, by any measure, constitutes big data. This means we have to be careful about the conclusions we reach when listening to a single comment from a sole customer. At the same time, to the degree big data is used, individual complainers and the responses they experience will get lost in the mix. Sometimes, it is the single complainer who gives the most helpful feedback.

Business problems will be better understood by using high volumes of data, which are not possible using smaller sample sizes. Research used to be primarily conducted in surveys sent out to individuals or individual businesses. Studies of three thousand people were and are still considered large, but compared to the analysis of twenty million online reviews, three thousand responses is tiny. I should point out that larger amounts of IT dollars are now being invested in applications that can analyze vast amounts of data. Becoming more and more common, these analyses offer different conclusions to help us learn from online reviews—and not just in the hospitality industry. Big data will become the go-to research approach in the future. It makes it possible to draw more complete conclusions because more data is available. This means we can have more confidence in the advice that researchers provide.

Regarding positive or negative customer comments, one critical guideline for organizations is establishing policies regarding online comments. Then companies must consistently follow through. This consistent follow-through is an investment in something much more significant than dealing with one complaining customer.

The three Harvard Business School staff researchers mentioned above offer five principles based on their analysis of their twenty million sample size in the hospitality industry. They state these principles can positively impact online hospitality reputations. As the authors state, 89 percent (that’s almost the entire marketplace!) of today’s consumers read online review responses, and as a result, these five principles are worth studying. Their advice “mitigates potential future negative reviews and maximizes the benefits of positive reviews.”⁸ Here are the principles from their research, the takeaways that address the three fundamental questions listed above. It’s what analyses using big data can teach us.

Principle 1—Address positive online reviews by providing a generic, short response, such as “Thank you. We appreciate your business and comments.” Guests are more likely to stay with you based on your star rating. They are less likely to stay with you based on specific comments about favorable treatment.

Principle 2—On hospitality platforms, comments not responded to stay at the top. So positive reviews don’t get buried because they have been responded to, delay responding right away. Respond to them when they have moved to the second page of comments, which fewer consumers read, and then respond with short, generic responses. This will save time for the responder. Note that not all hospitality platforms follow this approach. Platforms have their own algorithms, such as YouTube and Facebook. Find out how comments are arranged on the platform where your company gets the most reviews.

Principle 3—Respond to all negative online reviews. This will give customers a chance to see what management is doing about the negative reviews. If customers’ responses are the same as other negative responders’, they aren’t as likely to post the same negative comment.

Principle 4—Address negative online reviews by providing tailored solutions to the specific complaint. Other readers will see that you are fixing the issues someone has already identified.

Principle 5—Respond quickly to all negative reviews. This way, anyone reading the comments will see that your business is committed to rapidly solving customer complaints.

The three Harvard Business Review researchers state that their advice, which works for the entire hospitality industry, has the most significant impact on large-chain operations. It seems that hotel guests don’t expect the big chains to respond to all their posted comments because of the volume of comments. However, if you are a sole hotel operator, respond to all comments. Ultimately, this research and similar studies lead one to a stand-out conclusion that responsive comments to negative online reviews help shape a business’s online reputation.

Speed and Customization Are Important

Following researchers who have conducted extensive data analyses of online reviews, we know speed and customization are essential when dealing with negative feedback. This typically means employing identified employees (or contracted outside agencies) to take responsibility to read the reviews and then respond. Obviously, this requires an investment of staffing and time.

It’s worth the effort. It’s not just about recovering one customer who wrote a strongly worded negative review. It’s about watching ratings improve after responding to large numbers of responses. Davide Proserpio and Giorgos Zervas, in Harvard Business Review, reported that Tripadvisor rounds average ratings to the nearest half star.⁹ For example, this means Tripadvisor takes a hotel from a 4.26 rating to a rounded rating of 4.5, and dropping one with a 4.24 rating down to a 4. Those star differences stand out for people who check reviews, and every hotel should work at getting their star ratings up a notch or two. Proserpio and Zervas are clear: improvement in star ratings directly relates to increased hotel bookings.

I ask participants in my speeches if they read reviews of hotels, and almost all of them raise their hands. Proserpio and Zervas also said that small changes in star ratings between hotels have an impact on people’s perceptions as to the quality of the hotel. After Proserpio and Zervas started writing about their findings, they found one-third of the hotels they studied increased their ratings by half a star or more within six months of their managers responding to online reviews. Their conclusion: improved ratings are directly linked to how hotels respond. It is, therefore, possible to manage the impact of online reviews.

Since one of the principles of the A Complaint Is a Gift philosophy is to not discourage negative feedback, large data collection may ultimately end up reducing feedback. The Harvard researchers think savvy customers reduce the number of negative posts they write because they don’t want an online exchange between them and hotel management to be permanently archived on the internet. This may be a mixed blessing, but it’s how this game is currently played.

Having read hotel reviews for years, I still find it amazing to go to travel platforms and look at individual hotels. I check to see how they respond to reviews, especially negative reviews. Many of the responses are obviously scripted. You can’t distinguish between different complaints or even different hotel chains in many cases. Many responses use “Thank you” and “We apologize” phrases. Then they shift immediately to commenting on what the customer liked about the hotel if anything was said, thereby just repeating the positive comment. When they address the negative feedback, they all “truly hope” the customer will give them another opportunity to demonstrate “our commitment to providing you with a more relaxing and positive experience.” This does not satisfy people who are serious about getting booked into a high-quality hotel based on other customers’ experiences. It’s hard to imagine what the hotel is really like.

But what if the Gift Formula were used so responses included statements about specific issues and how the hotel had already or was going to address those complaints. Other potential customers would see that the hotel was actually doing something about concrete suggestions to improve and not just attempting to sell them on the hotel site.

Online Complaints Can Be Hidden and Still Powerful

Online comments and responses mainly appear on industry-specific platforms. They can become viral if they land on social media platforms like Quora and Facebook. Just one person’s negative experiences can chip away at a company’s reputation. A friend, highly respected among his speaking buddies, travels a great deal for his speaking clients. He wrote about a negative experience with Southwest Airlines (SWA) on his private Facebook page. I doubt SWA will reach out to him personally and repair the damage as I don’t see an easy way for it to find his comment. That’s a shame because a lot of speakers fly SWA, and my experience is that they are good at recovering dissatisfied passengers. Here was his well-expressed complaint: “After 35 years we are breaking up. I have been faithful to choose SWA first when I can and they always told me the truth even when it would hurt. Sitting on a runway tonite having been told something that wasn’t true (5 times in 3 months) just to move me along and I am doing just that . . . moving along.”

With a review of this type, friends of his who fly will likely look for something negative on their next SWA flight. This then might impact their feelings about future bookings on SWA—and the personal stories they tell from their platforms. We sometimes forget that even though this example is anecdotal, every lost customer can be costly to a business. Yet most airlines today don’t pay any attention to the “whining passengers” who complain on social media. They recommend contacting the airline itself. Unfortunately, if you have attempted to do that, it’s not easy to talk with someone from the airline.

Most airline passengers are aware of “inconvenient” events while traveling, but they hope to escape bad treatment themselves. It’s a hoping game. Airlines will take care of their frequent flyers, but you have to call the airline directly. Posting on Facebook won’t do it.

I have accumulated over 4.6 million miles on United Airlines since flying with the company. As a result, I have a special United number to call whenever I face a problem while flying. The people who answer that number are remarkable. They once arranged to have my computer picked up and delivered to a connecting flight. I forgot my computer in the darkened jet ramp while I gathered my carry-on luggage that was too big for the overhead bins in the small regional jet I was on. United did this by working with ground personnel in Houston. They took my computer in a car and drove from one gate to the next on the tarmac, avoiding going through the terminal. They handed it to the pilot through the front window because the cabin doors had already closed. The pilot then brought it to me, where I was seated. While there, the pilot thanked me for my business! The passengers seated around me applauded United. I fully admit I caused the problem myself. This is proactive complaint handling because the chances of my computer being returned to me once I left Houston were slim.

Several websites attempt to get complaints through to airlines, but most of the owners of those websites believe the best thing to do is to contact the airline directly. Otherwise, they say, treat your email as just a way to blow off steam. If complaint events posted online become overwhelming, the US Congress will attempt to clear up some of the frustrating issues by passing new provisions of what the public calls the Passengers’ Bill of Rights.¹⁰

Passengers cannot be bumped once boarded, and pregnant women get to board first because of recent passenger rights legislation. It makes good press, but in all the miles I have traveled by air, I have never seen someone bumped once boarded nor pregnant women denied the ability to board first. The no-bumping provision was passed because of the incident with the passenger Dr. David Dao on a United Airlines flight (which I mentioned in chapter 4). This legislation happened not because passengers complained on websites but because of the shocking pictures the entire world saw of Dao.¹¹

The speaker with the complaint about SWA should have some relief from a provision in the Passengers’ Bill of Rights. According to the legislation, the government is required to “look into” whether it is unfair and deceptive to say weather has delayed a fight if other factors were involved. There’s a lot of wiggle room in the “look into” statement. Analysts say these so-called bills of rights are mostly written for crew, the airlines, and businesses like Amazon that want to deliver packages using drones. Don’t expect that online complaining will solve widespread transportation complaints.

As stated by John Prescott Ellis, the problem with attempting to draw any firm conclusions about online complaints is “The internet . . . touches almost everything.”¹² It’s so big, and we are all connected in thousands of ways. This doesn’t mean we can’t learn valuable lessons from the types of complaints businesses receive online. “Big data” analysis likely will ultimately lead us there as well.

The hospitality industry needs to pay attention to online complaints because a few complaints about cockroaches in a restaurant can seriously affect a business. It’s not just hotels, restaurants, and airlines that need to be on top of negative reviews. Almost everyone goes online to see what other customers have experienced with trains, rental cars, and entertainment. Many people check out medical personnel before making appointments. Retail shoppers look to see whether packages arrive on time and whether certain products do what they are advertised to do. This includes general retail, clothing, makeup, and home-cleaning and organizing products. When customers want these items, they typically go to the retail outlet site where they intend to purchase the product and read customer reviews. Or they Google the category they are considering and choose from dozens of websites where consumers post reviews. Businesses need to decide which issues will turn customers away and look at the complaints online through those lenses.

We need a great deal more research on this total topic today. We don’t know enough about online complaints and how to handle them in a reasonably simple, most effective, and least damaging way. Michael Schrage in Harvard Business Review warned, “To make a rude but relevant analogy, restaurants resolving complaints about food or service by giving the most generous treatment to diners who make the loudest scenes—instead of rewarding those customers whose complaints are more quiet and polite—are publicly subsidizing bad behavior.”¹³ Schrage indicated just as in a face-to-face complaint, overresponding or overcompensating extravagant complaints on the internet encourages extreme complaints—or lawsuits.

The above paragraphs wouldn’t have even been written twenty years ago. No one knows where e-commerce will be in another fifteen years. We know that customers are currently complaining about how difficult it is to complain online. Individual businesses can fix this. Customers don’t like entering a comment or review only to push the submit button and find out it went nowhere except to return an error message, apologizing for the inconvenience. Customers give up after this happens once or twice. Businesses need to test their websites to ensure all communication addressed to them will get through to someone in the company.

It’s also useful for e-commerce businesses to separate out the complaints they receive about the online shopping experience, products, different categories of products, return policies, shipping errors, and shipping charges. Don’t put all your complaints you get online into one category box. Handle each type differently.¹⁴