Every business occasionally experiences a customer complaint. How the business handles that situation says a lot about it. In the era of social media and brandjacking, the matter becomes ever more sensitive.
The problem is, you don’t know who that customer that you just alienated actually is. The image of some pompous customer demanding “do you know who I am?” may seem humorous but, you never know, it might be Time’s Person of the Year for 2006 – the internet content creator.
That was certainly Dell’s experience when it made an enemy of blogger and journalist, Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis began telling the story of his troubles with his ‘lemon’ of a Dell laptop and, worse, his treatment by their customer service teams. He began telling this story on his blog, and was stunned by the scale of the reaction. It seems that such problems at Dell were not as rare as the company would have liked or tried to imply.
Jarvis began to collate stories of poor customer service by Dell under the heading “Dell Hell”. Suddenly, disgruntled customers who had been separate and isolated were organised and communicating. The blog began to attract international attention. Dell was not in control of, or even really participating in the conversation about its brand. Dell had been brandjacked.
Eventually, Dell reacted the right way. They brought Jarvis inside. He became a part of first critiquing and then restructuring their entire customer complaints procedure. He helped train their staff. Now he is an ambassador for the company.
Another company that, eventually, got it right is United Airlines. This all stems from the unfortunate experience of airline customer and songwriter, Dave Carroll. I won’t tell you his story, but let him do it himself.
A year after the launch of the video, if you type “unit” into the search box on YouTube “United breaks guitars” is the third default option.
The YouTube video attracted 150,000 viewers on day one, and United Airlines contacted Carroll offering to solve the problem they had been steadfastly refusing to address for a year. But viral videos don’t stop there. The video had half a million hits in three days and five million in little over a month. At the time of writing, eleven months after the video was posted, it has almost nine million views. United got brandjacked. The Times suggested that in the four days after Carroll posted the video United’s stock price fell by 10%, wiping $180 million off the value of the company. This cannot be definitively attributed to Carroll’s brandjacking of the company – the price of the whole sector had been volatile for some time – but I have no doubt it concentrated some minds.
By the time United settled with Carroll, Taylor Guitars had already replaced the damaged instruments so United made a $3,000 donation to charity and gave Carroll some flight vouchers. It has certainly been reported that, contrary to his statement in the song, he does still fly with United, on his many trips to speak at conferences and training seminars about customer service. On one such flight, United lost his luggage.
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