What do you do when you feel so completely let down by a company and their faceless representatives, so utterly frustrated by the fact that they just don’t seem to care that your stomach is knotted and you feel like punching someone senior within the organisation?

Well, if you’re anything like me, you rant. In the old days we used to rant to our partner or our friends and whilst we might have felt like driving to speaker’s corner in Hyde Park and ranting to the world at large, we probably didn’t. And besides, by the time we’d have got there, we’d have probably calmed down a bit; our rant reduced to a very English ‘tut’.

But, in our modern, Internet driven world, we don’t need cars or megaphones – we just need a keyboard. We can tweet. We can post comments on Facebook, reviews on Trip Advisor or, if we’re really creative, we can make videos expressing our frustration and post them on YouTube. And we can do all of this in the heat of the moment, when we’re at our most angry.

And doesn’t it feel good to let the world know how much you hate a particular brand?! According to recent research from The Social Habit, 79% of us complaining about a brand on Twitter do so in the hopes that our friends will see it. Apparently only 52% hope the company will see it and only 36% of us expect the brand to do anything about our grievance.

So, whilst some of us might be hoping for a response from the company, it seems that the real driver for most of us is our desire for revenge. We want to hurt the organisation that has caused our increased blood pressure, our financial loss, our sleepless nights or simply our bad mood; we want to get back at them.

And social media means we can. The old adage of an unhappy customer telling ten others no longer fits in a world where one video entitled ‘United Breaks Guitars’ has already been viewed by more than 14 million people.

The way we complain is changing and that means that the way we train our staff to respond to complaints needs to change too. The old customer service skills remain valid, in fact, they’ve never been more important, since the cost of ‘getting it wrong’ has never been higher. But there are brand new skills needed too in this strange, digital age. How, for example, do you neutralise a very public complaint in 140 characters or less? How do you provide real-time responses when the office is closed? How do you turn a public relations disaster into a public relations success? 

Answers on a postcard. What am I saying? Answers below please.

Rod Webb
www.glasstap.com