A broken guitar. Multiple phone calls. Constant misdirection. Frustration. Rejection. Revenge. A YouTube video?
This the flow chart for Dave Carroll, a United Airlines passenger whose guitar was broken during baggage handling on his flight. After nine months of little recourse, lots of call transfers and few actual answers, Carroll took his fight to an emerging domain of complaints – the internet. He posted his country-twanged tune "United Breaks Guitar" on YouTube in mid-2009. The video – featuring comically inept baggage handlers – went viral. It now has over 10,000,000 views, Carroll has a recording career and United’s reputation has a significant dent.
In the Spring 2011 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review, Professors Thomas Tripp and Yany Gregoire tackled the burgeoning issue of dealing with customers who lash out online. Both professors have studied customer revenge for many years and recently waded into the online domain. They summarized the results of their research in the article "When Unhappy Customers Strike Back on the Internet." Customer Management IQ spoke with Gregoire recently about the article and the advice he would give companies for understanding and managing the threat of online public complaining. The full interview is available in the above podcast. Below is a brief recap of the authors' findings.
Tripp and Gregoire’s article focuses on the idea of customers who are victims of "double deviation." A double deviation indicates a customer who has experienced two significant deviations from a company’s normal service. First, there is a product or service failure – United’s baggage handling failure. Then, the second deviation is a series of failed resolution attempts – Carroll’s repeated attempts to contact United customer service representatives to no avail.
The research reveals that nearly all online complaining – 96 percent – follows a double deviation. It’s the repeated failures at recourse that cause a customer to move from feelings of dissatisfaction to feelings of betrayal. As the authors explain, dissatisfaction is associated with frustration and annoyance, "two relatively mild negative emotions that tend to be short-lived." Conversely, betrayal is affiliated with anger, a strong negative emotion driving strong negative responses. Feels of betrayal and anger are also more prominent in loyal customers. "A company’s best customers are the most likely to become its worst enemies in an online context."
The upside is that these data can inform best practices when implementing a recovery strategy. Tripp and Gregoire make several suggestions for how to apply this to managing practices. The keys are three-fold: tailor the response to the customer, respond quickly and accept blame while providing an explanation.
Loyal customers are more amenable to recovery efforts, independent of the size or monetary value of that effort. Accepting blame in this case is frequently the most important step. Casual customers are more interested in financial restitution. Either way, both have greater desire for revenge the longer a company waits to respond. Tripp and Gregoire’s research shows that once the four-week benchmark has passed since an online complaint, there is little point in even attempting an apology or restitution.
If a company can reach a disgruntled customer within the four-week window, however, it is critical that the apology seem sincere while accepting blame and providing an explanation. An online complainer will assume the worst intentions (often motivated by greed) were behind the company’s failure. A response should explain away these suspicions if possible. Even an attempted explanation is better than none.
Preventing the second component of the double deviation can greatly decrease the amount online complainers, however. In this vein, Tripp and Gregoire propose what they term the "triage system." Similar to the triage doctors perform during medical emergencies where they prioritize the injuries requiring immediate attention, companies should address customers suffering from the most severe service failures and who can be recovered. The most recoverable customers are often a company’s best customer and it is easy to identify the different levels of service failure. Tripp and Gregoire suggest structuring your outreach efforts accordingly.
Amid all the discussion of possible outcomes, however, the authors conclude that occasional online complainers are inevitable. It is having the proper processes in place, informed by the above research, which is the most essential element.