A little more sincerity can pay dividends online

WIRED:Companies are taking online complaint hits all the time and the smarter ones are finally learning the lesson

IT IS ONE of those classic anecdotes of the modern internet. Somebody gets bad service from a company, complains about it online – whether on Twitter, their own blog, or just in a highly forwarded e-mail. Next day, there’s a bunch of flowers from the PR honcho at the corporation and a promise to fix whatever consumer gripe they had.

Well, it should be. Actually, the real story is usually just the first part of this tale – the exploding e-mail chain, the storm of controversy on a round of blogs, the press story about Twitter-rage. Companies take a hit like this all the time and the smarter ones are finally learning the lesson.

Take Maytag, a US appliance company roughly equivalent to Electrolux or Creda in brand recognition over here.

Heather Armstrong, owner of dooce.com, power blogger and mother of two, complained online about her faulty washing machine – and the endlessly hedging Maytag repair workers who failed to fix or even replace it. Armstrong, faced with a stonewalling customer support representative, eventually said the internet equivalent of “Do you know who I am?”

She said: “Do you know what Twitter is, because I have a million followers on Twitter?” Unfortunately for Maytag, the support rep said that, firstly, she did know, and secondly, Maytag didn’t care. So Armstrong tweeted.

By the next day, Maytag was grovelling in apology (and several other appliance manufacturers were queuing to provide Armstrong with free washing machines).

Brand damage sustained, but swiftly repaired.

Like all questions about the internet, though, one does have to ask the two magic questions. Does it scale and what are the freeloading implications?

The first question looks harder than it is. Of course you can scale good customer service – or at least, you can do so more easily on the net than in “real life”.

Clumsy or rude customer representatives are a product of a phone support system that cannot and will not be as personal as its pretence. We are never going to get true one- on-one service, because every call centre has quotas, every call costs a company real money and every customer representative truly knows little, is paid less and has almost no real power.

On the net, you can at least indulge in a little triage. Take the site GetSatisfaction.com, whose business model is charging companies to create a space where their customers can talk to one another about their product problems. Sound like a PR nightmare?

Not if the company is keeping an eye on the high-ranking issues and steps in with a friendly hand when genuine issues are bubbling up. It is support without the firewall of a phone menu maze and scripted customer reps.

However, even if you’re intently listening online, you can’t hand out free fridges and a dozen roses to anyone who claims to be a top 10 blogger. That’s the classic internet freeloading question right there.

Escalating every Dooce.com (or person claiming to be Lady Gaga’s bestest friend) is going to be impossible when anyone on the internet can be famous for 15 (or 15,000) people.

Do we need support personnel to individually ascertain the Google rank of each complainant they deal with? Hardly. What corporations need to be is more honest about their own problems and capacity.

Once again, this is where the net can punish and reward. Recall why Armstrong finally lost patience with Maytag: because she had been repeatedly misled by repair workers as to when (and if) her washing machine would be fixed. It is difficult in a world, where “customer facing” individuals have little power yet where companies promise their customers that they intimately care and will attend to your every need, for anyone from a corporation to be truly honest.

We’re used to dissimulating lies about a company’s concerns, in the form of faceless public relations fluff and soft-focus advertising, but you can’t get away with that sort of thing online. People quote it, people comment on it, people recognise the distancing language and the plastic sincerity, because it clashes so much with everyone else’s casual, text-speak, off-the-cuff internet language.

However, the rewards for your brand if you decide to take down that insincerity a notch and start being more honest, are substantial. Ironically, perhaps the most honest person at Maytag during this incident was the support person who said that the company didn’t care how many users Armstrong had on Twitter.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the rep’s honesty actually endeared the company to a sizeable number who resented Armstrong’s use of her relative online power. It’s not much of brand reputation to hold on to: that you treat everyone terribly, no matter who they are online, but it’s a start.

The absolutely wrong conclusion to draw about internet customer service is that there’s a new wave of celebrities that must be pandered to. The real lesson is that if you’re honest and frank, the public will forgive you for far more than if you ignore the problem or ignore your customers’ cries for help.