Spending and Saving

Complain, Complain, Complain

If you’ve ever sat on hold with the cable company for 40 minutes while you tried to get an issue resolved, you already understand the agony involved in most customer service interactions. But with more and more people cutting down on non-essential costs—like cable, gym memberships, and weekly blow-outs at the salon, to name a few—due to the recession, an increasing number of companies are ramping up their customer service efforts as a way to keep people coming back for more.

Losing paying customers is always an unwanted event, of course, but it’s especially perilous for companies during a recession. According to a report published by the Forrester Research firm earlier this year, investing in customer service is one the best ways a company can hold onto its existing customers. Signing up for a company Twitter account or hiring a few “Help Desk” workers to respond to inquires via instant messenger will always be cheaper than investing in a multimillion dollar ad campaign, after all, which is why the same report listed investing in social-networking communities and becoming proactive about chat as two “recession-busting strategies” that major companies should utilize.

Here are a few of our favorite ways that companies are making it easier to complain—and finally get heard—thanks to the recession.

Reply on Twitter
No matter what your complaint may be, there’s a good chance that airing your grievances on Twitter will get your some type of response. To make sure the company in question is listening, simply @reply to the company before stating—in 140 characters or less—what they have done to earn your ire. It might also be helpful to state what they could do to resolve the matter, like the JetBlue customer who was able to snag a wheelchair for her grandmother’s upcoming flight just by posting the request on Twitter.

Check out Facebook
Becoming a “fan” of a particular company on Facebook is another popular way to get your voice heard by the higher ups. Although openly complaining about a company’s service on the “wall” of its Facebook page probably won’t elicit immediate reaction, it is likely to get noticed by managers at the company—especially if large numbers of people are complaining about the same issue. Businesses are much more likely to respond to your suggestions if they’re aired in an open forum, such as a Facebook wall, than if you simply call up a customer service phone number and complain as an individual.

Use Instant Messenger
Although many companies have been utilizing IM services for customer support for a number of years, the trend has been picking up steam since the recession began. One reason? Instant messenger is an instant, duh, form of communications that allows businesses—especially those that offer online shopping—to answer customers’ questions quickly, i.e. before that customer has had time to change his or her mind about the purchase. For the customers themselves, IMing customer service reps can be beneficial as well, since it means not having to sit on hold for hours on end to get an answer to a simple query.

Email Executives
While finding the email address of a company’s CEO hasn’t necessarily become any easier due to the recession, it’s still a highly effective technique when it comes to getting your voice heard. When you’re tired of waiting for a customer service rep to magically fix your problem, it could be worth sending a direct email to the top. Websites like Consumerist.com have been encouraging the strategy for years, posting the names and email addresses for executives at hundreds of companies across the country. You may not get a response every time, but when you do hear back you’ll be surprised at how satisfying the results can be, especially since most executives aren’t limited to the same rules for responding to customer disputes as lower-level workers and are more likely to dole out a full refund or a new version of the product.

Tags: business, customers, travel