Customer backlash against bad service

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."

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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.

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