Going Public With Gripes
Recently I was annoyed with one of my personal online service providers. SmugMug, the photo sharing site I pay $39.95 per year to use, was intermittently failing to accept my uploads. With 2 children starting school and a new soccer season, I have family members & friends chomping at the bit to share in all the excitement by viewing my photos. Obviously any delay in getting these albums posted is a problem, especially when it results in a “where are those photos???” phone call from my mom.
On Sunday night I was annoyed enough to express my frustration on Twitter:
Soon after that a couple things happened: SmugMug founder & CEO Don MacAskill started following me, and I received a tweet reply from SmugMug offering assistance via their help page/email. This got me thinking back to about a year ago when I tried using SmugMug as my HD video service. I upgraded to a Pro account and found that the upload speeds were too slow for me (note: this might have changed over the past year!). At that time I emailed SmugMug support and they could not have handled things better. They immediately downgraded my account and refunded the difference on my upgrade without any hassle whatsoever.
That’s when I started to feel remorse over my tweet complaint, for a couple reasons:
- This was a company that had established a track record of reliable support with me. Perhaps I should have sent an e-mail instead of delivering a public spanking-by-tweet.
- SmugMug is family owned and operated. Don is an entrepreneur just like me. Normally I tend to give small operations the benefit of the doubt when it comes to issues because I’ve been there before and I understand what it’s like to support a customer base with limited resources.
Looking back, the main reason I tweeted was because SmugMug is not free. As a paid service, I hold it to a higher standard even though it’s basically a start-up.
Obviously social media channels give people voices and influencing power they never had in the past. It wasn’t long ago that a terrible interaction with your phone or cable company might result in a bashing session around the office water cooler and perhaps a letter or e-mail complaint which never received a response. These days we can notify a mass of users in seconds via tools like Twitter & Facebook. Due to the viral nature of these broadcasts, one negative situation can quickly snowball.
So now that we have these public channels available to us, the question becomes: when do we use them? What causes consumers to take that next step and go public with their issues and general complaints? Here are some factors I consider before I “go public”:
- Free vs. Paid: I generally expect more from a service I pay for
- Previous Support Interactions: if I’ve gotten quality support from you in the past, I’ll lean toward keeping things private
- Provider’s Background: entrepreneurs/start-ups usually get the benefit of the doubt because I can relate; big corporations like cable companies, phone companies, etc are easier to scream at because they’re nameless/faceless
- Do I aspire to do business with your company one day?: no sense burning bridges before they’ve been built!
I find there are no hard and fast rules on this list. Facebook is a free service (at least in terms of monetary payment), yet I wouldn’t hesitate to rant about Facebook in a public forum. On the other hand Charter is a big company that has won me over through its proactive use of Twitter.
I’m curious to know how others feel about public gripes. What’s your main reason for complaining about a product or service on public channels? Do you get a better response from providers when you go this route? Do you consider the size of the company or what you’ve read about them before you complain? Please chime in below!
