When customers are on the receiving end of bad service,
it's basic human nature for them to tell at least ten of their friends.
In fact, it's good for your mental health to vent your pent-up
frustrations and it's also good for the economic health of those
companies that listen and act upon these complaints. While it's a given
that companies that fail to listen will lose customers, what happens
when a customer bottles up all his anger and fails to complain?
This guy allegedly kidnapped a cable repairman and held him hostage till his cable was fixed. And then there's this
76 yr-old church-going secretary who waited two hours to talk to a manager, then came back with a hammer and in her words,
"I
smashed a keyboard, knocked over a monitor ... and I went to hit the
telephone. I figured, 'Hey, my telephone is screwed up, so is yours.'"
"Meet today's consumer vigilantes," writes
Jena McGregor for BusinessWeek. "Even if they're not all wielding
hammers, many are arming themselves with video cameras, computer
keyboards, and mobile devices to launch their own personal forms of
insurrection. Frustrated by the usual fix-it options—obediently waiting
on hold with Bangalore, gamely chatting online with a scripted
robot—more consumers are rebelling against company-prescribed service
channels. [...] Consumers already pushed to the brink by evaporating home equity, job
insecurity, and rising prices are more apt to snap when hit with long
hold times and impenetrable phone trees."
When
an employee goes off the deep end, the not-so-funny expression "going
postal" is often commonly used. But what about when an irate customer
snaps, shouldn't there also be an idiomatic expression?
How about "going Time Warner" in honor of the company's placing fourth for its cable customer service in MSNBC's
2007 Customer Service Hall of Shame and as well as winning the dubious distinction of appearing again in the
2008 Hall of Shame with its cable service earning eighth place and its Internet service, AOL, earning the most shameful first place dishonor.
For
yet another reason to nominate Time Warner for this particular
appellation, add in the lawsuit that the City of Los Angeles filed
against the company for bad service and
violation of their franchise agreement. In a
USA Today article
headlined "L.A. Sues Time Warner Cable, Claims Shoddy Service," the
paper quotes the lawsuit's assertion that Time Warner's service was "so
intermittent and inferior in quality that it was not much better than
no service at all."
Time Warner, if you're listening, you should heed the advice of Pete Blackshaw from Ms. McGregor's article:
"There's
a certain degree of extremism that's popping up, [a sense of] I'm going
to get results, whatever means necessary. Companies can brush these off
as being atypical, mutant consumers, or they can say there's a very
important insight in [their] emotions."
And
for all you irate consumers, instead of going Time Warner and taking up
a hammer, use your mouse and vent instead on sites like
Angie's List,
Consumerist,
Epinions,
planetfeedback,
Ratingz.net,
Tripadvisor and
Yelp.
Mona Shaw, the 76 yr-old who hammered the property of her cable
provider ended up a hero and received national media attention. Most
irate customers who break the law end up
like this.
