Bring me your poor, your tired… your axes and hammers

Businessweek has an excellently written article about consumer vigilantes that lends validation to our warnings about the Care 2.0 world — it’s worth a quick read, if for no other reason then to laugh at the opening anecdotes.  The upshot is that more and more consumers are taking to Teh Intertubes to complain about incidents of crappy customer service that they receive.

What scares me is that they’re rewarded with their efforts.  The guy who destroys his malfunctioning Macbook with an ax?  Gets a free replacement from Apple after 340,000 people watch his YouTube video.  The guy whose speakers were blown out by his cell phone and wrote a song about it?  Gets $100 speaker replacement from an AT&T VP “in the spirit of goodwill.”  The lady who smashed up a Comcast office with a hammer?  Media sensation.  In fact, the article points out that people who posted their rants on ComcastMustDie.com and included their account numbers ended up getting calls from Comcast shortly thereafter with help.  People who make it past the barriers of a customer service organization to an executive immediately find themselves helped.  If you reward people for being angry, aren’t you just encouraging more customers to throw tantrums to get what they want?  How is that going to help anyone?

When you call a customer service line, do you find yourself rehearsing your lines while waiting on hold?  “I’d like to talk to your supervisor.”  “This is unacceptable.”  “If you can’t help me, then get me someone who can.”  All tools we learn to use to get past the seemingly artificial barriers in place to keep customer service costs down and prevent us from getting the help we need.  Well, if companies want to avoid becoming the next YouTube complaint, their only good option is to make for a rewarding customer service experience.  Well-designed automated systems are great for some tasks.  Live agents are necessary for others.  And poorly designed automated systems that trap you in a maze of options, or off-shore agents whose heavily accented “how’s the weather today, sir” comments do nothing to solve your problem, are only going to make things worse!