Internet Complaints

Recently I came across the latest in what seems like a newly developed common practice amongst internet users – someone being wronged by a company and then taking their complaints to the web, in every possible way they can. In this case, the guy used Twitter almost exclusively – and his complaints were re-tweeted by countless other users, thereby spreading them to the far corners of the web.

Best course of action …

While I’ve certainly been in situations with service-based companies where they had me so infuriated that all I could think about doing was telling everyone I knew about it, I usually took a moment to chill out then came up with a better approach to deal with the situation.

I remember the old saying, “the squeaky wheel gets the oil” but I think there’s also a certain way to go about bringing a problem to the attention of a company and I’m not fully on board with the, “let’s spread this all over the web” approach.

However, I’ve also noticed a vast decline in simple customer service across the board – no matter what size the company. It seems some of the largest companies feel that because they have millions of other users/customers, that one complaint or one lost person is not a big deal. However, when someone takes their complaint and basically markets it via every online channel they can think of, a lot more people can find out about the shoddy service and find out quickly.

Personally, I still believe that trying the old fashion telephone, and possibly working your way up the, “chain of command” with your complaint might still yield better results.

I do give the latest internet complainer a bonus point for attempting to solve the issue by phone first. But when he encountered one instance of bad customer service after another, no solutions and no sympathy from employees he spoke with, I’m not surprised he turned to social media.

Socially irresponsible …

Companies who are on top of social media these days know to look out for customer or user concerns via those channels, and respond to them. Companies who aren’t, well, they suffer the new consequences of being asleep at the helm in these shark infested waters.

I do feel that if you’re going to have a company Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or anything else, that someone should be engaging people as well as responding – even if it’s a customer complaint that initially paints the company in a poor light. Some simple customer service, even if it’s only online through social media is often all it takes to turn a customer’s frown upside down.

Right of way on the superhighway …

The other thing of importance to mention here is that when someone publicizes a complaint on the internet, whether it’s via a blog, social media, another website, etc. it truly is out there for public consumption. People may run with it and start spreading it around to their circles of online friends and so on and so on. But what people never seem to stop and think about is – did the person have the right to such a wide-spread complaint? Was it valid? Was it completely true?

Let’s refer back to our buddy the latest complainer. Some of the services he was using involved, “the cloud”. Now if you don’t know what that is, this isn’t the article to explain it all, but nevertheless there has been some recent publicity surrounding this form of online storage and the problems associated with it. The other main service he was using was web-based email. One of his major complaints is that he lost a considerable amount of data and everything on his email accounts.

When I read his complaint, while I felt for him on the crummy customer service level, I had no sympathy at all for his data and email loss. Why, you ask? Well, he put his trust in technology and as long as there has been technology there has been failures of it. Probably somewhere along the line he also (like so many of us do) checked off a box under a Terms of Service agreement that stipulated he understood that the company was not responsible for personal data loss.

If it were me, and I had super important documents or contacts that had come through my email, I would have actually saved the docs elsewhere, printed them, written down the contact info – basically just transferred it all from email to alternate storage. For my business email, I use Thunderbird specifically so it’s not only stored online – it’s downloaded to my computer. And I certainly am not going to upload important files for storage only in, “the cloud”. I have backups of backups of backups of the most important electronic files.

Now I wager that a lot of people either didn’t read the 10 page diatribe this guy posted or that they put the same sort of faith in technology as he did to want to help him spread his complaint all over the web without stopping to think that he might have been able to prevent some of the problems (or that, as lame as it may be, the company just might have it in their TOS that they absolve themselves of responsibility for your personal data).

Then again, many people couldn’t survive more than 48 hours without going into withdraw symptoms over the loss of their tech.

There’s also the matter of the internet vs. reality. Now I really don’t have any cause to think what happened to this guy didn’t happen, but in other cases of internet complaints I’m not so sure. When something is put out as fact on the internet it’s certainly not always fact and this has been proven time and time again. It’s why websites like Snoops are so popular and why wikipedia shouldn’t be used as serious reference material. And it’s why, when you come across something like this, you should question it before reacting to it.

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