Taking Customer Service Complaints Public
Comments (3) This isn’t exactly a new development in social media, but a few examples of it have caught my attention lately. It seems more and more people are taking their customer service complaints public via social networks.
At the time this post was written, this pic had 3,289 diggs and counting.
Comcast isn’t exactly known for it’s great customer service, but I thought this was just plain funny.
Here’s one that Ed Skidmore told me about.
According to Dave Carroll’s website,
In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and my Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. I discovered later that the $3500 guitar was severely damaged. They didn’t deny the experience occurred but for nine months the various people I communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate me for my loss. So I promised the last person to finally say “no” to compensation (Ms. Irlweg) that I would write and produce three songs about my experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming. I promise.
The first installment (shown above) has gotten over 3.1 million views on YouTube. Two of those were me.
It seems that, at very least, taking a complaint social can draw some attention to the issue. At what point do you decide to do this? And, does it accomplish anything?
A few year’s back, I had a laptop I purchased from Best Buy. I took it in for a small fix covered by the warranty, but when I got it back, they had created a new problem. For the next 2.5 years, I took into back to the Geek Squad with some frequency. Each visit brought a new excuse (and by the way, a different reported cause for the problem which kept them from having to write my notebook off and replace it). It was during this same time period that Best Buy was sued for not honoring their service plans (I was aware of the lawsuit, but did not pursue it in hopes of getting my computer fixed). I wonder what, if anything, would have been different about the outcome of those events if I had taken the fight public?
How does it make you feel that people take their complaints to YouTube, Digg and Twitter. Should churches worry? How do you think this will effect the public at large? Will companies be held more accountable?
