Fabien Vegas Corporation
Public Relations and The Cost of Complaints

Consumer Sites: Getting Railroaded

Naturally, no business is devoid of complaints; Dell Computer (historically, a great customer service company) for example, is the subject of over eight-hundred complaints on one consumer site alone.

(This of course reiterates what we already know - the more business you do, the greater the number of complaints, justified and otherwise.)

Today, the customer, in numbers, is a very powerful lobby that now has a public forum through which to relate its experiences with merchants, and it is doing so in increasingly greater numbers.

As such, for continued success, this issue must be seriously addressed.

For example, if you sell five-thousand vehicles per year, you may have thirty-five-thousand prospects in contact with your dealership during that time. If one-percent, or, one out of one-hundred of these prospects becomes disgruntled, you will be exposed to potentially three-hundred-fifty complaints per year. (Not to mention parts and service customers and respective prospects.)

However, today, even one Internet complaint is too many. Complaints published in this fashion last potentially forever. In fact, people surfing the web today may not even realize a complaint they’ve come across is actually five years old. Moreover, posted complaints have a way of drawing more complaints from others with similar experiences; and it only takes one to set it off and running. Furthermore, people don’t even have to log on and read individual complaints because the page titles and they’re frequency alone on the search engines can suffice to paint a devastating picture.

The Potential Damage:

I’ve personally read hundreds of complaints, and in my estimation, ninety-percent are frivolous. Generally speaking, very few actually relate any actual damage or loss, and some are nothing more than simple gripes over waiting too long for a service to be performed. But, unfortunately, if the frequency of even petty complaints is high, their sheer totality can conspire to make your company look absolutely terrible. And there can be no doubt that you will lose business because of it.

(This is the primary factor that prohibits publishing a forum on the company website for the purposes of feedback; for in doing so, you will facilitate an environment where you will be required to defend the company repeatedly against a preponderance of frivolous grievances. Better would be to solicit feedback via email and post the positive reviews either to your website or other satellite.)

Naturally, there are often instances in the course of doing business where circumstances create a condition where an altercation with a customer is inevitable. It's no one's fault. Wrong customer, wrong salesperson, wrong day, etc., so that even if you are doing all you can to make customers happy every day, you will still have the occasional disgruntled customer. Therefore, to drastically reduce and/or eliminate complaints overall, you need to accept that the customer may be wrong in many instances, and that it really doesn't matter who's right or wrong. All that matters is that you now have an adversary - justifiably or otherwise; you now have a person out there who is disgruntled and ready and willing to relate his or her negative experience with your company to anyone that will listen; or even worse, publish detrimental content on the net and/or possibly even raise complaints with authorities.

So it makes sense (both philosophically and economically) to accommodate the disgruntled customer, rather than allow them to walk out unsatisfied and risk the consequences.

Search Engines and Complaints:

Search engines, can be roughly compared to a telephone book; where your business is listed and in many cases how people find you. Now, imagine if consumer reviews about your organization were also listed in the phone book along with your advertisement. How important then, would it be to make sure every customer and prospect is content?

A particular problem with search engines and complaints is that, each time a new complaint is posted to most any site, that site’s listing then rises in the search engine rankings (for your keywords) and thereby tends to attract additional complaints due to its newfound visibility. Thankfully, when postings do cease, the complaint listing will usually slip back down in the search results to a page far enough back to be of no real consequence. This problem of new posts resurrecting a complaint means that you cannot defend yourself by posting a rebuttal to the complaint site in your own defense; for if you do, you will bring that listing back up to the top of the search results, and as the text included in the listing will tend to include only that portion of the complaint that is negative, you would be doing yourself more harm than good.

Complaint Sites:

How is it that complaint sites rank so highly, you ask? Because, in addition to the text of the document containing multiple instances of your keywords; the page titles and META tags will also include them. As the revenue of virtually all complaint sites is generated by advertisements, the goal of these sites is to piggy-back onto business listings in search results as effectively as possible, in the aim of maximizing traffic and subsequently, ad revenue. Naturally, it follows that the larger and more popular the company and its traffic, the greater its value to the complaint site and its revenue.

(A cynic might even suggest that complaint sites would do well to "seed" their listings so as to get a head-start.)

To make matters worse, new forums, blogs, complaint and business review sites are cropping up almost every week, and as such we must reasonably conclude not only that people with a grudge love to complain publicly and in company, but also that through this ever-increasing accommodation, the breadth of opportunity to do so is likewise expanding.

Perhaps the worst aspect of the complaint site is that there is simply no possible way to ensure that what is posted is in fact, true. Likewise there is no way to prevent an individual from posting multiple complaints under false names. More alarmingly, there is no way to circumvent competitors from using the service to smear one another. To be fair, some sites will record the IP addresses of posters and reverse lookup the name to which it is registered; should they discover the IP address is registered to an auto dealer, they will delete the post and restrict any further posts. However, all any crafty individual needs to do to get around this "security" is to post from different machines at different locations, perhaps a public library PC where it is completely plausible that multiple posts could originate.

Syndication:

In addition to the ever-expanding universe of gripe-sites, we now encounter the galaxies of consumer blogs and complaint syndications. Cropping up with increasing regularity, the operators of such sites simply aggregate particularly sensational content from media outlets, forums, complaint sites and elsewhere (possibly adding a little editorial content) and invite others to comment. (The angle here being that the articles and comments provide easy content from which the syndicating site gathers search engine traffic, which is subsequently capitalized via advertising.) In any event, what follows (with the more popular posts) might be likened to an international mob, so worked-up that individuals take it upon themselves to visit the subject of the complaint and register their personal disapproval by way of a flurry of company bashing, hateful email. The worst aspect of complaint syndication (and the syndicator’s goal) is that along with the original complaint surfacing in search results for the dealer keywords, often, the syndication’s content will also feature prominently; the net effect being that one complaint is multiplied many times.

(Left unchecked, it's reasonable to assume that one day, not too far off in the future, all consumer sites will be full of complaints for virtually every dealership in the country, at which point they will have lost any relevancy because it will be impossible for the consumer to determine which dealer has the fewest complaints. Although, it's also reasonable to assume that such a situation would only give rise to the "car dealer complaint counter sites.")

Lawyers, Blogs and Money:

If all this isn’t bad enough, consider the consumer lawyer website; where, once having found an alleged victim of an alleged corporate wrongdoing, these legal eagles proceed to publish their account of the victim’s allegations in press releases, blogs, and (naturally) their website; which of course, all surface with the search engine results for the auto dealership’s keywords, providing the mechanism through which they hope to attract enough plaintiffs for a class action.

Again, the more popular the dealer, the more visits the legal site will receive due to their effective use of the dealer’s keywords throughout the document, title and META tags.

Potential Catastrophe:

Lastly, with a rash of highly visible complaints, legal actions, and invariably letters to the consumer affairs division, an Attorney General may concur with the sentiment expressed so voluminously on the Internet and be moved to take action.

"Sucks" Sites:

Occasionally you get a disgruntled customer who has all the time in the world, a computer, and a Godaddy account; the result being a personal crusade to destroy your business via the "yourcompanynameheresucks.com" site. No matter should the grievance be 10 years old, or that the manufacturer made the customer whole a long time ago, or that you have every right to refuse service to troublemakers; this person is going to troll the interwebs all day, every day, looking for any crumb of derogatory ramblings about your company and then link to each fragment six ways from Sunday so that every complaint out there will be ranking on page 1 of Google by Tuesday. Next, making the rounds to every complaint site known to man he or she will post their "story" then double back to start updating the original post with follow-ups. What follows is others chiming in sympathetically, and the bonfire has begun.

Funny, your organization might employ 200 people and have 30 years of goodwill business under its belt, yet some doofus in a cabin with a PC can match its presence on Google with a potentially devastating impact to your bottom line - and likewise to the employ of those 200 folks under your rooftop(s).

(Google really needs to consider tweaking its algorithm.)

Leverage Goodwill:

Unfortunately, the disgruntled customer is much more motivated to publicly express his displeasure than the satisfied customer is motivated to relate a positive experience. As such, one should view satisfied customers as essentially non-disgruntled; in other words, people who will probably not have anything to say about your company one way or the other. But the unhappy customer must be dealt with, because once riled-up, they tend to cultivate a deep and visceral, personal resentment toward the company, and are keen to bring economic harm; in extreme cases, bent to destroy the company single-handedly.

In the end, you can turn this around to your benefit, where a few people will publish positive reviews and experiences, essentially putting them to work for you writing pro-propaganda promoting the business; and with disgruntled customers made satisfied, hopefully reduce or eliminate the damage. From this perspective, the power of the consumer to publish personal experiences on the net is actually leveraged to your advantage.

Again, none of this is possible if you do not embrace the concept of the customer being number one, and make this a reality every day.

Conversely, based on prospects per year, this means that thirty-five-thousand consumers and prospects (from the example referenced above) are in a position to relate an experience about your company. If you concentrate on putting out all the fires, you effectively converted this group of people, for the most part, into friends, and few, if any, enemies; powerful friends indeed considering their nascent influence.

Through inciting increased positive published reviews about your company, you then make it difficult for the disgruntled to publicly post negative reviews as they will likely be seen as a minority and as such unreasonable in their negative assessment.

In other words, instead of having say, seventy complaints and three positive reviews (which looks absolutely terrible), you might experience seventy positives and only three negatives. You’ve then created a climate where the disgruntled are "spitting into the wind" so to speak, when it comes to public reviews about the company because they are in a small minority. This would also preclude any attempts by competitors to defame the company because the amount of work involved would be considerable to overcome the great majority of pre-existing public reviews that are clearly positive.

This of course, does not mean that thirty-five-thousand people are going to publish favorable content about your company every year; but only that you are increasing the likelihood of positive public reviews while decreasing the likelihood of the contrary.

Of course, you don't have to give cars away to make people happy, in fact you may well be able to charge a small premium over competitors in exchange for the enhanced experience and value-adds.

Be Vigilant:

To reiterate, you cannot allow negative reviews to grow out of control - because it creates an environment conducive to exploitation by competitors and the frivolous; a virtual feeding frenzy on your company by way of bad news.

Turnaround Initiatives:

Should your dealership already suffer from a preponderance of complaints, the enactment of initiatives designed to mitigate the damage as well as control the bleeding would be a good idea. Some suggestions follow:

a.) First, whatever you do, do not subscribe to a car dealer "review site" and attempt to defend yourself against complaints. For though doing so you will be conspiring to legitimize your nemesis. I cringe whenever I come across an auto dealer that has "joined" a rating site and become "certified" because that site has now become the dealer's partner; attached like a remora fish to a shark, and with each new complaint the site will rank higher for your keywords, and each time you reply you compound this effect, yet now you're forced to reply and even worse, perhaps paying for that privilege. These sites subsist on a very restricted diet - complaints, so don't be fooled into thinking that by "playing along" you will ever get out from under their thumb. Furthermore, consider such remuneration as tantamount to blackmail or tribute exacted by freebooters. Please, do not patronize these parasitic opportunists. Besides, don't you have enough problems already, without having to check in to some complaint site everyday, potentially wasting another 3 hours apologizing profusely because someone still hasn't received his or her floor mats? Additionally, there remains the very real possibility that with enough public kowtowing to your disgruntled customers as a "certified dealer," other less than scrupulous (but nonetheless keen) fence-hangers will see you as an easy touch and join the fray so as to not miss out on the feeding frenzy.

b.) Shift the focus of advertising from deals to customer service and no-hassle shopping.

c.) Consider reducing or eliminating any too-good-to-be-true campaigns, because, for example, gimmicks like the "drag it in and get eight-thousand trade-in credit" will meet difficulty capitalizing anyone who owns a computer, because in a matter of a couple of clicks consumers can get the lowdown on the deal from the Internet; moreover, these types of gimmicks have a history of generating complaints.

d.) Drive home the customer service initiative with staff. Levy fines and/or termination for lack of adherence to the program. Consider weekly meetings reiterating the program and the philosophy. Meetings could also facilitate a platform for Q+A with staff and/or customers; and provide the theme for commercial spots and possibly even local news coverage. (It would make a great story.)

e.) Hire a customer service specialist to mediate all complaints and resolve all customer problems.

Conclusion:

So to wrap-up, you must envision each prospect as an individual capable of publishing negative information about your business, overnight, on the internet, and having that information emerge in a highly visible fashion; possibly even contributing to a rash of bad news published over weeks causing great harm to any legacy marketing campaigns the company has initiated. You can’t endeavor to build a great reputation on the Internet over years, and then allow individuals to completely undo that goodwill in a matter of weeks. You simply cannot allow this to happen.

The prospect is a potential time bomb ready to go off. Who is wrong or right, again, doesn’t matter, as the consumer will paint a picture to discredit your company and you have no viable recourse. It’s their word against yours and there’s nothing you can say after the fact that will carry any weight in this public forum. The only option is to eliminate the propensity for customers to have a bad experience. The Internet is not going away, and it is an increasingly large part of the retail automotive business. You can’t fight it, you must join it. Every employee must be drilled with this concept every week. The customer is number one. And most importantly, not because of the threat of negative public reviews, but because it’s the right way to do business in the first place; treat the customer as you would want to be treated yourself.

Should going forward a complaint be posted, you must make every effort to contact that person and resolve the issue, stipulating that the person attempt to remove the original post (difficult) and/or (at least) post a new review indicating the issue has indeed been resolved.

Lastly, you can't believe everything you read in the papers, so how is it people should believe what they read on the wild-west Internet? Yet Google sees fit to provide anybody at all with a complaint (real or imagined) top-billing on their search engine; right alongside the dealer's listing; making life in the car business that much more trying in these already difficult times.

Read more about Google's mistreatment of car dealers.

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