Making your angry voice count

by Paul McNamara

April 6, 2001 —

You're on an important business call while driving out-of-state when your allegedly nationwide phone service starts to fade. Apologizing through the static, you find a coffee shop a few miles down the road so you can redial while sitting still.

The new connection works . . . for a few minutes . . . then craps out.

You wish you had skipped the coffee shop and chosen a bar.

Such was Pete Blackshaw's end of an abbreviated interview with yours truly. We've all suffered similar indignities at the hands of phone companies, airlines, banks, merchants and service providers that too often fail to provide service at exactly the most critical moment. When we're mad, we want to complain to the proper authorities -- and right this minute. . . . Of course, we're lazy, too, so this ire usually passes without retribution.

Which brings us back to Blackshaw and his PlanetFeedback.com, a Cincinnati start-up that gives consumers the tools and knowledge they need to make their angry voices count: contact names, addresses, writing tips and more. PlanetFeedback also gives companies that license its technology for their Web sites a way to aggregate and better understand these complaints -- as well as compliments. This data can be invaluable if handled properly, Blackshaw says, but it often slips through the cracks in customer affairs departments.

The end result of PlanetFeedback's commercial offering is "an early warning system" that companies can use to catch service and branding problems before they become expensive crises.

Seems to me there are two ways to deal with complaints: Bad companies stick their heads in the sand and rely on a no-win strategy of constantly replacing dissatisfied customers. Good companies face the music, look to learn from their screw-ups and, if necessary, pay for help to fix what's broken.

PlanetFeedback is betting that there are enough of the latter to support a business.

But aren't its clients paying for feedback that's generated by a self-selected sample, which may or may not be representative?

"We believe that consumers who go out of their way to provide feedback to companies are the most important audience to measure," Blackshaw says. "They tend to be the most talkative, most passionate and most engaged. It's a very important subset of the broader population."

In the marketing world, desperate times call for tasteless measures.

A case in point is the tag line for a Qwest Communications radio ad airing in Massachusetts: "It's Qwest DSL, or you're SOL."

For those who may not know, the "O" in SOL stands for "out of" and the "L" stands for "luck."

The "S" stands for a word we don't print in Network World, not because we're prudes or don't use salty language in conversation -- heavens, no. We don't print it because using the word in such a public forum is impolite at the very least, and potentially damaging to one's corporate image at the very worst.

Of course, we're not trying to sell DSL.

Network World