By Heather Havenstein

From article in Computerworld.com

Full article at: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9090398

May 28, 2008 (Computerworld) Comcast Corp. scored a public relations coup in April when an executive responded within 20 minutes to complaints about a cable outage posted by a prominent blogger on a microblogging site.

Michael Arrington said that a top official from the Philadelphia-based cable company responded to his post and made sure that a technician was dispatched to fix the 36-hour outage.

Comcast is one of several large companies that have recently started using Web 2.0 tools to monitor blogs and social networks to discover user concerns. The companies are also using such tools to communicate with and learn from customers, according to analysts and executives.

Arrington said that he first notified Comcast of the outage by a more traditional means — the telephone help desk — but technicians there had no idea when the widespread outage could be corrected.

Granted, Arrington’s stature in the blogosphere may have hastened the response to his complaint, but it did come in the midst of a months-long program, called Comcast Cares, started by the company to monitor Twitter and respond to customer concerns posted there.

In October, 2007, prior to Comcast’s launch of the Web 2.0 effort, magazine columnist and radio personality Bob Garfield created a blog called “Comcast Must Die.”. Garfield’s goal was to help Comcast customers publicly air complaints about the cable company. At about the same time, a 76-year-old woman made national news by taking a hammer to a keyboard in a Comcast office after becoming frustrated with Comcast’s customer-service response.

A cursory check of Comcast Cares on May 22 found multiple examples of employees responding — often in less than 15 minutes — to complaints that customers posted on Twitter, where users can create 140-character “miniblogs.” Comcast employees mostly apologized for the problems and requested the information needed to solve them.

A Comcast spokeswoman said the company created the program to proactively address customer concerns. She said the company can now engage its customers wherever they are most comfortable.

Most early corporate Web 2.0 efforts included internal blogs, social networks and online communities that focused on improving communication among workers. The growing popularity of such tools among consumers has led to the launch of products that fit into what some companies are calling “Customer Service 2.0,” which monitors what customers say in online forums.

In late April, New York Life Insurance Co. began a move to Customer Service 2.0 by providing a platform for customer feedback on articles and other content in its Web site. The company also added links to various social networking sites so users can bookmark and share information across the Web.

Ken Hittel, vice president of corporate Internet development at the insurance company, said the initial version of the site is designed to first give customers a way to “talk” to New York Life. The feedback program is a first step in a plan to make better use the company’s Web site to gain insight into customer needs, he added.

The next step will be to allow employees to actively respond to the customer comments on the site.

The New York-based insurer, like many other companies, took the first step toward Customer Service 2.0 with some trepidation, Hittel said.

He noted that some executives worried about what customers would say about the company once the “barn doors” were opened. “In fact, if there is some particularly bad thing that people want to say about us, it’s better that we find out about it,” Hittel maintained.

“People are talking about us on the Internet just like they are talking about everyone else. This gives people a chance to talk about us directly to us as opposed to behind our back,” he added.

Therein lies the key reason why IDC analyst Rachel Happe criticized companies that are reluctant to embrace the new form of customer service because they fear negative feedback. She called such concerns a “red herring.”

Customers have always been in control of the brands they use, she noted. Now, however, they can arm themselves with virtual megaphones and shout their concerns throughout the blogosphere. It’s only common sense to at least listen to what these users say, Happe said.

In many cases, just acknowledging a problem can help ease criticism on the Web, she noted.

For example, Dell Inc.’s public admission that some critics of its support programs were correct has led to a slow shifting of the company’s image. Since its admission, the tone of some initially critical bloggers has become neutral or even positive, she said.

Meanwhile, SAP AG’s online social community for developers and business process managers now includes more than 1 million users, she added. Many small and midsize companies are using SAP-sponsored online communities to gain access to a network of peers to discuss questions and concerns about SAP products.

The SAP program is improving the lot of users, who can get quick answers from fellow customers. It’s also cutting SAP’s support costs as fewer questions make it to help desk personnel.

“Customers are actually starting to feel like they can ask questions, which is good because they are engaging and they are getting more satisfaction — at a lower cost to the company,” she added.

In addition, company executives can use the customer input as they make strategic business decisions.

For example, The Artful Home, which sells art and other home decorating items, significantly changed the content on its Web site based on user suggestions.

The Artful Home site is run by The Guild Inc., a Madison, Wisc.-based art dealer that links artists with potential buyers of their goods.

By monitoring the number of customers participating in specific discussion topics and analyzing the content they posted, the company found that they are mostly interested in how to use the products they buy in design and decorating projects.

“That was a pretty resounding answer to a very big question for us,” said Toni Sikes, the founder and artistic adviser at The Guild.

The user needs surprised the company because some executives thought that bolstering information about individual artists and their artistic motivation would most benefit customers, Sikes said. Others had maintained that it was most important to tell customers how products were made.

Read full article at: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9090398

From http://Pinkslipblog.blogspot.com

By Maureen Rogers

One of the worst jobs I ever had - and, given some of the jobs I’ve had, that’s really saying something - was as a customer service rep at Sears.

In those days, of course, we didn’t have a fancy name for the job like “customer service rep”, let alone a fancy acronym like CSR. I have no idea what the official title was, but we called ourselves “customer complaint takers.”

This job - which I worked for a while when I was in college, well over 30 years ago - was at the Sears regional headquarters in Boston. As I recall, our service area covered New England, upstate New York, Quebec Province, and the Maritimes.

I worked there with a couple of friends, and we were given absolutely no training whatsoever - just thrown on the phones, where we took complaints down on paper forms (those multiple layer ones like you get with a Fed-Ex label). After we took the complaint, we distributed the copies to multiple areas where - presumably - someone would eventually act on them. The pink copy went into a vast, rotary “tub file”. You hit some sort of button, the tub churned to the right letter of the alphabet, and you tucked the file into the appropriate place.

Some of the complaints I remember as vividly as if I had handled the call yesterday.

A man named Peter Rabbitt called one day and, with a pronounced brogue, informed me that Sears had not picked up his old fridge, which they’d promised to do when they delivered his new one.

“I’ve a good mind,” Mr. Rabbitt told me, “To just put the old ice box out on my front lawn.”

Well, that would sure show Sears now, wouldn’t it? (I hope he took the door off of it, which I’m sure that he did, as he sounded like a thoroughly conscientious and decent person.)

One woman called to track her order - Christmas presents for her kids. Unfortunately, she’d sent cash - $17 - rather than a check or money order, so her order was long gone and there wasn’t much we could do to trace it. When I commiserated with her, she told me I was very nice and asked me if I were the owner.

No, I explained, it was kind of a big place and I just worked there.

Another time, I was blasted by someone from Dorchester (a blue collar area of Boston), who demanded that I “get my ass down to Dorchester with the paint” she’d ordered so that her husband could paint their house during his rapidly dwindling week off.

This was in the days before vulgarity was quite so common, but I did tell her that I, personally, was just taking down the information and would not be getting my ass anywhere.

The woman backed down and was actually quite sweet and reasonable. And, of course, she had a point about the missed delivery date for the paint.

I told her I’d see what I could do, which wasn’t much other than put the pink copy of the complaint in the rotary file. I can’t recall where the multitude of other colored copies went. I seem to recall tossing them in the wastebasket but, despite the fact that we received no training, this doesn’t strike me as quite right.

When we weren’t taking incoming calls and/or when we reached the magic hour of 5 p.m., when inbound customer service was turned off, we followed up on orders that were not clear. (In those unimaginably by-gone days, when we were not in such a great rush to get work boots, Lincoln Logs, cross-cut saws, house dresses, and hand-held mixers absolutely, positively, overnight, people actually placed catalog orders via the mail. How very quaint!)

If there was something unclear on the order form, it was our job to call and ask for clarification.

I remembered an attempt to call some old Down East geezer in Maine, who had written in that he needed a “puny” for his “furcane.” I was canny enough to realize that he was probably looking for some thingamajig for his “furnace,” not his “furcane”, but I wasn’t able to interpret “puny”. Nor was I ever able to reach him. I wonder if he ever got his “puny”.

One of my favorite calls was to a French speaking family up in Quebec.

Since my French was limited to the “ou est la bibliotheque?” variety I’d learned in high school, I was not able to get across to Mme. Gary Doyon that we needed to know what name to put on the personalized ballerina pillowcase she’d ordered.

When I explained to my boss that I wasn’t able to get an answer, he grabbed the form and wrote “Gary” where the name went.

I told him I was pretty certain that the recipient of the ballerina pillowcase did not have the first name of “Gary”, but I was overruled.

Somewhere up in Canada, a disappointed little girl found a pillowcase with “Gary” on it under the Christmas tree. What a Joyeux Noel that must have been, eh, ma petite?

Customer complaint taker! What a miserable job!

When I wasn’t laughing myself silly, I hated every moment there - mostly because I didn’t feel that I ever helped one single Sears customer derive any customer satisfaction whatsoever from any encounter with Sears that involved me.

Every time I feel like raging at a CSR, or slamming the phone down on them, I think back to my time, gamely manning the phones for Sears, calling Quebec on a cold, December night, trying to ask Madame Gary Doyon what name she wanted on the ballerina pillowcase.

posted by Maureen Rogers

Read te entire article at http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3if57cb0c541e56ebf990efc9c9949c2af

April 24, 2008

-By Eric Newman, Brandweek

NEW YORK Forget focus groups. Consumers are giving it straight to brands, and each other, via online social media in big numbers, according to a recent study by the Society for New Communications Research, Palo Alto, Calif.

“Exploring the Link Between Customer Care and Brand Reputation in the Age of Social Media” surveyed more than 300 active Internet users during February and March.

The study found that 74 percent of respondents choose companies or brands based on customer service experiences shared by other Web users on the Internet. Eighty-one percent of those polled said they believe blogs, online rating systems and discussion forums give consumers “a greater voice” in customer service. However, only 33 percent of respondents felt that companies take customers’ opinions seriously.

“This study indicates that there is a growing group of highly desirable consumers using social media to research companies,” said Ganim Nora Barnes, a senior fellow at SNCR, in a statement. This demo includes adults 25-55 with a college education, making over $100,000 a year. “These most savvy and sought-after consumers will not support companies with poor customer care reputations, and they will talk about all of this openly with others via multiple online vehicles. This research should serve as a wake-up call to companies: listen, respond, and improve.”

The study also found what marketers might find somewhat counterintuitive. While search engines were deemed the most valuable online tools for researching customer experience with a given brand, 39 percent of respondents rated blogging services like Twitter and Pownce as being of “no value” to such research. Similarly, 27 percent found YouTube useless, and 22 percent said the same of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

Of those industries judged to be doing the best job in using social media to respond to customer service issues, technology, retail and travel companies took top honors. Dell and Amazon were noted most often as those companies doing the best job handling customer care problems via social media.

Utilities, healthcare and insurance firms fared the worst.

Written by Martin Haworth from his website:

http://www.Coaching-Businesses-To-Success.com

1. Be Open
   Start hearing what your customers are saying. Truly listen and realise you can benefit if you hear properly.
2. Create Conversations
   Get out there with your customers. Ask questions, value their input and build great relationships for the future.
3. Get Past Criticism
   It’s not about you, or your people. The negatives you get are fixable - and sometimes need a deeper consideration of what they mean. So be honest about causes (hint - it will be something to do with you!)
4. Savour Feedback
   It is a gift for you - relish it! You may wish to let off a little whoop of delight every time you get feedback. It truly is a cause for celebration.
5. Get Your Team Onboard
   And share your enthusiasm too. Get your people realising that they are not in the wrong - yet they can be a lot more in the right. Be happy about this!
6. Keep in Touch
   When you have these open and honest conversations with your customers, remember to take contact details and get back to them with outcomes - they will love it! And become an ongoing advocate for you.
7. See Opportunity
   In days where prices are squeezed,; product distribution is widespread; and services are being shipped overseas, this level of positive, constructive customer relationships is about all you’ve got - it can become your USP.
8. Share Widely
   Let all of your people know the successes you are having. This creates an upward spiral of involvement - everyone will want their ‘customers’ to be the useful ones!
9. Keep Smiling
   Hey - have fun with this - respect your customers and be prepared to get involved with them - share a different sort of relationship from the usual adversarial. Smile together:-).
10. Give Back
    Treat your customers kindly. Encourage feedback and reward them with gifts - be different! They and what’s more you will love it!

Mar. 31, 2008 (Investor’s Business Daily delivered by Newstex) –

A Verizon (NYSE:VZ) customer thought he was making a routine call this month by dialing toll-free to ask for a rebate. But he got an unexpected jolt when a recording directed him to another number that turned out to be a phone sex line.

Verizon Communications VZ quickly corrected the wrong number. But the damage was done. The customer blogged about the incident, which caused the wireless carrier to issue a public apology for the flub.

Such bizarre glitches are unusual. Yet the rise of blogs, camera phones and video Web sites means buyers today have a much larger megaphone to amplify their gripes.

In turn, companies that focus on consumers — including phone carriers, retail stores and banks — need clear policies to make customer service a top priority, says Bruce Temkin, an analyst at Forrester Research. (NASDAQ:FORR)

“Customer service comes at that point 14 time when customers are highly engaged in the problems they have,” Temkin said. “So it’s always a difficult and important moment of truth for the company.”

A new study from Accenture (NYSE:ACN) ACN found that 59% of people had actually stopped doing business with companies in the past year due to poor service. That’s based on a survey of 3,500 consumers on five continents. Just under half of those polled said their service expectations were met only sometimes, rarely or never.

Often the problem stems from cutting costs at the expense of customers, says Robert Wollan, global managing partner for Accenture’s service transformation business.

He says companies are misguided when they keep people on hold longer or slash store hours just to save money.

“There are still many gross examples of companies (encouraging) the wrong behaviors,” Wollan said. “You have to align the company’s goals through the eyes of the customer.”

Spotty Service

Everyone knows that customer service is vital, but lots of firms still address the task haphazardly. For instance, only 10% of retailers measure customer satisfaction on a weekly basis. Just 8% do so annually.

Even more surprising, 6% of retailers don’t have any set schedule at all in tracking customer satisfaction. That’s according to an annual survey of 137 retail firms by the National Retail Federation and IBM (NYSE:IBM) IBM.

One clear step to improving satisfaction involves appointing a high-level executive with real authority to enforce service levels. At some companies, this role is known as the chief customer officer.

Another tactic is to create programs which stress “the voice of the customer,” as Temkin puts it. For instance, this can involve assuring that all complaints get resolved on a single call, rather than being handed off to multiple reps.

“Companies have to look at every interaction from a customer point 15f view,” Temkin said. “This gets the whole company thinking about things from the outside in.”

He says all interactions should be judged by how well they help customers reach their end goals. Managers, moreover, need to focus on three key questions to get service levels right. They are: Who are your users? What are their goals? And how can you help them achieve those goals?

Companies should take responsibility for any problems, and communicate their message clearly. In addition to showing empathy for consumers, managers must find concrete ways to resolve problems. They also need a clear method to measure success, Temkin adds.

“The fact is that customer service is really, really hard,” he said.

ForeSee Results is a firm that measures online customer loyalty for retail Web sites. In 2007, its aggregate customer satisfaction rating fell by 1.3% to 74%. The rating declined for nearly half of 40 online retailers last year due to higher consumer expectations, ForeSee Results’ CEO, Larry Freed, said on a recent conference call.

Retailers whose scores improved last year included Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) BKS, Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) WMT and Best Buy BBY, according to Mark Mahaney, a Citi (NYSE:C) Investment Research analyst who hosted the conference call.

Mahaney says there are essential elements that contribute to improved customer scores like this.

“Focusing on brand consistency, increasing product selection and enhancing the user experience are some of the best ways to gain ground in customer satisfaction,” he wrote in a note to investors.

Lower-priced stores can deliver strong customer service too, so long as consumer expectations are clearly defined and met. Ensuring that people know what they’ll get — not necessarily “wowing” the customer — is the key, says Temkin.

“What is the customer’s expectation for the brand, and how often do you meet that expectation? You need to line up to that mark every time you touch a customer,” he said.

Beware Of Churn

Intense competition in telecoms means even satisfied customers will drop their phone plans to get a still-better experience. Such turnover is known as customer churn.

Sprint Nextel S is battling a major churn problem due to weak service. Sprint (NYSE:FON) was ranked 106 of 112 companies for quality of service in a Forrester study last year. Sprint also finished dead last among the eight mobile service providers.

Sprint CEO Daniel Hesse blames his company’s sinking stock price on weak service. Many irate customers have dumped Sprint, pulling down its sales and shares. On a recent earnings call with analysts, Hesse said improving the customer experience has become “job one” for Sprint.

“Because of the customer experience we provided last year, churn is accelerating,” he said. “In conclusion, our business is not performing well right now, because we have not provided the right customer experience.”

Sprint isn’t alone. In a recent survey of 2,000 mobile phone users in the U.S., 96% said they wouldn’t hesitate to switch carriers to get a better experience. In fact, 72% had already made a switch due to a negative experience.

The Harris Interactive (NASDAQ:HPOL) survey was commissioned by Chordiant Software (NASDAQ:CHRD) CHRD, a maker of business software for customer service.

Another call center technology firm, Amdocs (NYSE:DOX) DOX, found similar results in its survey of more than 2,000 consumers in the U.S. and Britain. About four in five consumers were satisfied with their service levels. Yet one in three said they would switch to another carrier to get better services for mobile games, entertainment and ads.

Another customer service software firm, RightNow Technologies (NASDAQ:RNOW) RNOW, has developed new features to monitor consumer topics and emotions on service calls. In this way, call center agents can use the software to get more context about a caller’s specific concerns and service history.

Thanks to Web, Advertiser Can Engage in ‘Conversational’ Marketing With Customers

By Michael Bush

Published: March 20, 2008

NEW YORK (Adage.com) — Conversing with consumers and finding out what they think about their brands has become a whole lot easier for marketers because of the web. And whether it’s an actual customer-service call or inquiry or responding to a comment on the corporate blog, marketers need to start looking at each interaction as a marketing opportunity. That was one of the main themes that emerged during the “Listenomics: So you want to be a conversational marketer?” panel at the Ad Age Digital Conference.

The panel’s moderator, Pete Blackshaw, exec VP-strategic services at Nielsen Online, asked the three panelists, “Is this marketing or is it customer service? In the age of consumer control, is there an opportunity to really build consumer loyalty through that type of interaction?”

Interactions equal growth
Tony Hsieh, CEO and director, Zappos.com, said those interactions have been the force behind the company’s growth. “The way we have grown the company is focusing on customer service and not actually spending a lot of money on marketing or paid advertising,” Mr. Hsieh said. “We take the money we would have spent on advertising campaigns and instead put that back into the customer experience and grow through repeat customers and word of mouth. For the past nine years that’s been our primary source of growth.”

Mr. Hsieh said his company gets nearly 5,000 calls a day from customers and it views each of those interactions as a branding opportunity. “At that point you have the full attention of that customer,” he said. “That’s the time where you have a huge opportunity for you to shine.”

Linnea Johnson, director-consumer services, Unilever, who called her division the “Stitch and Bitch Club,” said the world’s second-largest consumer package-goods company should be doing more to take advantage of those types of interactions.

Talking ‘your ear off’
“We’re a little bit behind the momentum,” she said bluntly. “The consumer services department can talk your ear off about all of the information of the brand, tell you what brands to use and cross-sell you but what we’re not allowed to do is take ideas from you. So the minute someone calls up who has a really forward thinking way to promote Dove and Suave, we have to shut them down because that’s what legal tells us to do.”

She believes the consumer-services divisions, especially in the consumer package-goods space, could play a significant role in the development of marketing campaigns based on the interactions they have with consumers. “In the CPG industry [consumer services] are the people who are really entrenched in the company’s brands,” she said. “And there’s a lot of information we could help you with when you build your campaign or build your ads to deal with consumers.”

Rick Clancy, senior VP-corporate communications, Sony Electronics, and primary author of Sony’s first consumer-oriented blog, said Sony also had legal concerns about accepting unsolicited ideas from consumers. “But once you decide to dive into the pond of social media you have to do away with that,” Mr. Clancy said. “We get ideas on my blog that are shared throughout Sony and in fact a few of them have been incorporated.”

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak

This will be the first recession in which the Internet will play a central role for the American consumer–and for marketers.

Of course, the Internet was around during the shallow recession of 2001, and almost 50% of Americans were using it. But it was not yet embedded in our way of life, largely because broadband penetration was, at the time, only about 20%. Today, more than 70% of the population is online, with more than 80% of these Internet users having high-speed access.

The Internet has empowered consumers as never before, providing previously unknown and unimagined opportunities to make informed decisions with detailed information, product ratings, expert and user-generated reviews and price comparisons on anything from computers to coffee beans to cat food.

In good times, when consumers feel cash-rich and time-poor, they can afford to be less diligent about their spending. But as economic pressures mount, sentiment changes. People feel cash-poor and are more willing to invest time and effort in getting the best deal.

What sets the current recession apart is that, for the first time, consumers have a tool that empowers them to subject everyday buying decisions to the kind of scrutiny formerly reserved for big-ticket items and large business-to-business transactions.

Marketers should anticipate this shift. They will not be able to rely on ads to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes–or on imagery to wow them.

Maybe even more important, it won’t be as easy for companies to control the expense line to make up for the loss of top-line revenues. In past downturns, cutting corners on quality has been a virtually foolproof way to cut costs and boost margins, at least in the short-run.

Not this time. Not when consumers can set the bar higher and easily find what they want at the lowest possible price. Not when any degradation of product quality or crummy service experience is subject to being instantly “outed” by the bloggers and reviewers on the myriad user-generated consumer review sites.

“Caveat emptor” now has a companion: “seller beware.” Even the slightest marketing chicanery is liable to be instantly pilloried on a global network, especially when consumers are fearful and on edge.

A confluence of factors has increased the likelihood of more consumers turning to the Internet to manage their way through their personal household recessions.

Let’s start with the price of gas. Shopping online is just less expensive than driving to a store. Depending on how and where you shop, you can find tax savings and shipping deals online.

And the downturn is dovetailing with a plethora of new, category-specific consumer review sites. Joining broad-based veterans like Epinions, BizRate and CNET are narrowly-focused comparison shopping sites specializing in coffee, beauty products or pet supplies.

There’s also been an explosion of online retailers: from Amazon and its brethren, to the online divisions of bricks-and-mortar retailers, to the many niche stores that exist only online. And then there are the Internet’s versions of “mom and pops,” “stores” that do business within the cozy confines of eBay (nasdaq: EBAY - news - people ) or Craigslist. It all adds up to a bonanza of choices for cash-strapped consumers–and a new set of challenges for those who sell to them.

Virtually anyone selling anything should be online, with as much sophistication as they can afford or muster. And they should follow two cardinal rules:

–Maintain quality and don’t over-promise. When anyone who uses your product or service can readily find an audience to whom to complain, the road from credibility to ruin is very short.

–Keep a close eye on pricing. The online dynamic is totally different than having customers in your store, where they might be willing to pay a premium because they’re there. Facing a page of pricing options online, shoppers can go to another “store” in a matter of seconds.

Online shopping–and the use of price-comparison engines and consumer-generated reviews to make buying decisions–has been growing steadily throughout the decade. The recession is going to supercharge that growth as current users find new categories in which to shop online and as millions of others jump in to manage their shrinking budgets.

As shoppers become increasingly comfortable with the process during this downturn, it is likely that the combination of convenience and easy-access to comparative information could cause enduring changes in consumer behavior.

Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollak are partners at Reason Inc., a marketing-strategy consulting firm that works with clients in a range of categories, including media and entertainment, financial and professional services, packaged goods and the public sector.

Growing gap between promised and delivered experience

By Jena McGregor

Business Week

updated 7:29 p.m. ET, Tues., Feb. 26, 2008

In the annals of customer service, 2007 will go down as the year fed-up consumers finally dropped the hammer. In August a 76-year-old retired nurse named Mona Shaw smashed up a keyboard and a telephone in a Manassas, Va., Comcast office after she says the cable operator failed to install her service properly. During her first visit to the branch outlet, the AARP secretary says she was left sitting on a bench in the hallway for two hours waiting for a manager. She returned, armed with a hammer, and let loose the rallying cry “Have I got your attention now?” Afterward, she was arrested, fined $345, and became a media sensation, capturing the hearts of frustrated consumers everywhere. (Says Comcast: “We apologize for any customer service issues that Ms. Shaw experienced.”)

Three months earlier, in May, Michael Whitford uploaded a video in which he chooses among a golf club, an ax, and a sword before deciding on a sledgehammer as his weapon of choice for bashing his nonfunctioning Macbook to smithereens. In the video, Whitford, a systems engineer from Chandler, Ariz., says that Apple declined to cover the repair under warranty, citing damage from a spilled liquid. More than 340,000 people have viewed the black-and-white smash-up on YouTube. Whitford, whom BusinessWeek was not able to reach for comment, denies in the video that he spilled anything. In early July, he wrote on his blog that Apple had replaced his laptop. “I’m very happy now,” he wrote. “Apple has regained my loyalty.”

Meet today’s consumer vigilantes. 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. After getting nowhere with the call center, they’re sending “e-mail carpet bombs” to the C-suite, cc-ing the top layer of management with their complaints. When all else fails, a plucky few are going straight to the top after uncovering direct numbers to executive customer-service teams not easily found by mere mortals.

And of course, they’re filling up the Web with blogs and videos, leaving behind venom-spewed tales of woe. “There’s a certain degree of extremism that’s popping up, [a sense of] I’m going to get results, whatever means necessary,’” says Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president of Nielsen Online Strategic Services, which measures consumer-generated media. “Companies can brush these off as being atypical, mutant consumers, or they can say there’s a very important insight in [their] emotions.”

Behind the guerrilla tactics is a growing disconnect between the experience companies promise and customers’ perceptions of what they actually get. 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. Just ask those who responded to our second annual ranking of the best companies for customer service, which uses data from J.D. Power & Associates. The average service scores for the brands in our study dipped slightly this year, and about two-thirds of the names that were in both years’ studies were lower. (Like BusinessWeek, J.D. Power is owned by The McGraw-Hill Companies.)

Empowered customers
A swell of corporate distrust — exacerbated by high executive pay, accounting lapses, and the offshoring of jobs — has people feeling more at odds with companies than ever before. “[That] has a visceral effect on how customers approach more day-to-day transactions,” says Scott Broetzmann, president of Alexandria, Va., Customer Care Measurement & Consulting. Meanwhile, he says, companies are responding with tighter return policies and increased focus on potential fraud. “You’d have to go back a long way to see the kind of acrimony that you’re seeing now.”

Technology is aiding the uprising, empowering consumers to do much more to make themselves heard. Now, with the proliferation of online video, they can be seen as well. “You could only get the point across so much with text,” says Blackshaw. “As soon as you start adding sight, sound, and motion, you’ve got a whole other level of [emotion].” More consumers are equipped with mobile Web devices that can find executive e-mail addresses and phone numbers anytime, from any place. At the same time, customer angst sites are no longer just shouting “YourCompanySucks” into the cyberdarkness, but acting as gathering spots for sharing call-center secrets and trouble-shooting tips. And as the audience for more blogs and social-media sites such as Digg reach critical mass, it’s easier than ever for consumers to wallpaper the Web with their customer-service nightmares.

Add a powerful media voice and a provocative site title to a blog, and it can have extraordinary impact. Bob Garfield, an Advertising Age columnist and National Public Radio host, lit up the blogosphere in October with a site cheekily called ComcastMustDie.com, one of the salvos in what he called his “consumer jihad” against the cable company. After repeated delays with his own service, Garfield, who has hosted a podcast on the site (special guest star Mona “The Hammer Lady” Shaw!), suggested that customers post their account numbers on the blog. Activity on the blog has slowed, but not before dozens of customers followed Garfield’s suggestion; many report back, he says, that Comcast called them soon after they posted their account numbers and rants. Garfield can’t help but point out the irony. “They’ve outsourced their worst-case customer-service issues to a blog dedicated to wiping them off the face of the earth.”

Marcelo Salup credits Garfield’s blog for finally getting Comcast to show up on time when his Internet and cable connections failed. Years of dialing the call center for a technician yielded at least eight missed appointments by Comcast, he says, but a post on ComcastMustDie brought a phone call the next morning and, later, a lead technician who showed up on time. Now, Salup says: “Anytime I have a problem, I also post it on the blog.”

Other Comcast customers have used blogs, too. Dan Ortiz says he called the cable provider at least 20 times during his first month as a subscriber to fix dropped Web access and screen-image problems. Then the 26-year-old bike messenger logged on to The Consumerist, a blog with more than 2 million unique visitors a month that’s part of Gawker Media’s digital empire of snark. There he found a consumer vigilante’s gold mine: a list of e-mail addresses for more than 75 Comcast executives and employees, along with instructions for launching what the blog calls its “executive e-mail carpet bomb.”

Ortiz got lucky. After firing off a note copying all those names the day before Thanksgiving, he quickly had an inbox full of out-of-office replies, complete with contact information containing direct numbers. He called a Chicago manager at home, who put his lead technician on the case. Ortiz says a swarm of eight trucks showed up on his block. “Once you get ahold of [executives], they bend over backward for you,” he says. He adds that Comcast sent him a tin of gourmet popcorn for Christmas and more than $700 in credits. Even better, he now has the mobile numbers for the lead technician in his area. “I’m not calling customer service ever again,” he says.

The unenviable task of responding to such digital vitriol falls to Rick Germano, Comcast’s senior vice-president for customer operations, who took over the role just as Garfield’s “revolution” got under way. Germano says reading blogs “is very new, at least to Comcast” and that he’s expanding the number of “e-care” representatives to help track and respond to blog comments and e-mails that come in through a new link to his office on Comcast’s site. “We’re servicing a million customers a day,” he says. “An extra hundred doesn’t really faze us.” A Comcast spokesperson says the company is making efforts to improve customer satisfaction and that it’s reacting to other blogs besides Garfield’s. Scenarios like Salup and Ortiz’s are “not the type of experiences that we want our customers to be having. We’re going to respond to our customers wherever and however they have voiced their experiences. Ideally, we’d prefer it to be in the traditional ways.”

Going to the top
For consumers who really want gold-plated service, little compares to a resolution from “executive customer service.” These “Valhallas of customer service,” as Ben Popken, editor of The Consumerist, has called them, are powerful support reps who may sit at corporate headquarters or even in call centers. Typically, they respond to complaints that first come in to executives; these specialists may also respond to high-profile customers who pose legal or P.R. threats. The Consumerist, which instructs customers to try regular support numbers first, has been active in outing such numbers at a couple dozen companies.

Although executive customer service has been around for years, many companies are reluctant to talk about it. “They’re usually stealth,” says consultant Broetzmann. “Obviously, you don’t publish the phone numbers. You don’t even tell people they exist.” Washington Mutual and Circuit City declined to provide details to BusinessWeek about their executive customer support; Bank of America wouldn’t say more “because of operating and security purposes.”

Consulting firms that help companies manage call centers and train employees say the online posting of these numbers is having an effect. Baker Communications, a Houston training firm, started up a course 18 months ago to prepare more people for such executive-service teams. More than 25 companies have sent employees, says Baker CEO Walter Rogers.

The biggest challenges in customer service may be dealing with consumers who are hard to mollify. For some, the sting of a bad experience cuts so deep that it transforms them from a merely upset customer into an activist no longer just looking for a refund. Take Justin Callaway, a Portland, Ore., freelance video editor. He started his campaign against the wireless company Cingular — now AT&T — in 2006 after a technical glitch that he believes ruined one of his computer speakers. He had the speakers, which contained an amplifier, turned up full blast. When his cell phone rang, he says the speaker next to it made a loud noise and then went dead.

Callaway didn’t call customer service right away. But when he looked into the issue for a grad school project months later, he learned more about GSM networks, which Cingular uses, and radio frequency interference, which he believes caused the damage. “I really felt irked that they didn’t disclose [it].” He got some friends together to record a tune about Cingular. One of them helped him animate an angry bandit in the shape of the carrier’s orange trademark, complete with an AT&T blue-and-white pirate’s bandanna and an eye patch shaped like Apple’s logo. (Cingular/AT&T is the only wireless provider that offers the iPhone.) His video, “Feeling Cingular,” has been viewed more than 37,000 times on YouTube.

About a month after posting the video, Callaway got an e-mail from Bob Steelhammer, then a vice-president for e-commerce at AT&T. “Justin, in the spirit of goodwill, I would like to replace the $100 computer speakers on your home video-editing system,” Steelhammer wrote. “Please let me know what brand and model [they] are.” Callaway, who works with video equipment, says that even if there’s not damage the phone causes an irritating buzz, and feels AT&T should do more to make consumers aware of the issue. That’s why he didn’t accept the offer. “It wasn’t about the speakers anymore,” he says. He’s not stopping with the video, either: Callaway is seeking class-action status for a suit against Cingular over subscribers’ inability to use their phones in some settings without interference. An AT&T spokesperson says that, due to the proposed litigation, it could not comment, but it works to resolve consumers’ issues promptly.

Flight or fight
Most customers, of course, don’t have the time or energy to go that far in their service insurgencies. They want an apology, a human being who answers the phone, or simply some bottled water after a few hours sitting on the airport tarmac. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t above a few digs at executives’ expense or a call to a cell phone after hours. That’s especially true when a direct line to the CEO is the BlackBerry sitting right there in their laps.

The US Airways plane Ron Dee was on last October had just pulled away from the gate when the pilot came on the loudspeaker to tell the Cleveland-bound passengers that they were 42nd in line for takeoff, Dee recalls. A one- to two-hour delay was expected. Later, thunderstorms delayed the flight even more, prompting another warning: The crew was coming up on its allowable flying time.

Dee, who develops real estate for a restaurant company, flies 100 times a year and is used to delays. That wasn’t what upset him so much. “About three hours into the wait on the runway, there’s no water left on the plane,” he recalls. (A spokesperson for Republic Airways, which operated the regional jet for US Airways, says that records from its vendor show the flight was fully catered and that other beverages would have been available.)

After a quick search on his BlackBerry, Dee found e-mail addresses for Doug Parker, US Airways’ CEO; Robert Isom, its COO; and Henri Dawes, its director of customer relations. His first missive, time-stamped 5:59 p.m., fired this shot: “If you get a chance, please call me and we can discuss how we handle customer service in our restaurants. Maybe that would help your company.” The next, at 6:40, invoked the JetBlue Airways incident last February, a weather-induced operational snafu that was followed closely by CEO David Neeleman’s departure. “What is that CEO’s name from JetBlue [who] resigned? I am going to call information and get his home phone number. Maybe he can get us back to the gate.” Says Dee, whose flight was delayed more than four hours: “I probably sent an e-mail every 15 minutes or so for the last two and a half hours” he was on the plane.

He had nothing better to do: The flight was brought back to the gate, and Dee spent the night in a Philadelphia hotel he paid for himself. He never spoke to Dawes, but he did get three vouchers totaling $425. Would he use the BlackBerry as a stalking device the next time he’s stuck on the runway? “Absolutely,” he says. “You guys as a company, regardless of who you are, exist because of me and my fellow paying passengers.”

Copyright © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23283402/page/2/

By Cindy Zetts

SE Living Editor

You’ve probably figured out by now that I keep the Southeast King County economy afloat — probably almost single-handedly.

In other words, I spend a lot of time, energy and money shopping and eating out. Recently, though, I feel the service I get has taken a plunge.

Would it kill to be friendly to a customer? Or helpful?

I’ll share a couple of recent stories. You be the judge.

I ordered macaroni and cheese and a Caesar salad at a Kent restaurant a few weeks ago. I got mac and cheese but no molten cheese sauce — the whole point, if you ask me. Thankfully, I noticed that before I drove back to work and went back in to get the it.

I didn’t notice, however, until I was back at work that the salad had no dressing, either on it or on the side. I tossed (no pun intended) the $8 salad and phoned the restaurant. The bartender was apologetic — and pleasant (as was I) — and she promised me a free salad next time and the manager added a $10 gift certificate.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s really nice.” And more than I expected.

Of course, two weeks later when I tried to collect, a different bartender rudely said she knew nothing about the free salad but offered to give me half off. I declined the offer, saying I’d get the free salad later. She grumbled and then grudgingly took the salad off my bill. I still haven’t seen the gift certificate the manager was supposed to send me.

Lesson: If you promise a customer something to make up for a mistake, make sure you deliver, preferably without a hassle. I know that mistakes happen, but business owners can’t afford to screw up the compensation.

Another example is a recent trip to a new department store. I went to the jewelry counter to buy a watch. Two employees stood talking to each other. They saw me looking and waiting for help. They kept talking. I waited a full five minutes.

Who finally helped me? The watch-company sales rep who was visiting the store. She graciously answered my questions and gave me advice. When I left, I decided I wouldn’t buy a watch at that store if it were the last store on Earth.

Lesson: You’re paid to work. Socializing is fine, but help the customers first.

Maybe it’s me, but shouldn’t good customer service be common sense (and practice)?

If you’re in the service business, please remember that a smile and a little help go a long way. You want customers back.