Customers to Businesses: Can you hear me now?

Perhaps you've seen the oft-run Verizon commercial that shows a dedicated employee testing the coverage of the cellphone system by walking around as he continually asks the main office 'can you hear me now?'  This is a dual-message ad because it is supposed to show that Verizon is not only obsessively committed to improving coverage for its cellphone customers, but also that it is closely listening to its customers.  Many companies don't listen to their customers because (1) it costs money, and (2) the price of ignoring them is not all that great.  So companies spend money on advertising rather than on actually addressing customer complaints.

After all, what's a disgruntled customer going to do?  Run their own TV ad?  Hold a press conference?

Well now that the Internet has arrived the customer can do something even more compelling than hold a press conference: the mistreated customer can post his experiences to the web.  A press conference is over in 15 minutes and has a limited audience, whereas information on the web is permanent and is available to anyone who knows how to do a simple search. No one understands this better than Mark Hurst:

While staying at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco this spring, Mark Hurst was annoyed when he learned that it charged guests $2 to make a toll-free call and $1.50 for a local call. As an Internet consultant who specializes in improving the "customer experience" of corporate and commercial Web sites, he found the charges akin to getting a dead fish on his pillow. When he vented his annoyance in a weekly e-mail newsletter he publishes that deals with a range of consumer experiences, he struck a chord with readers. That column got more of a response than anything I've ever written about the Internet or Web sites," Mr. Hurst said.

(story via New York Times)

As a result of his bad customer experience Mr. Hurst started a site called This is Broken, where customers with bad experiences can air their gripes.  This is an excellent idea.  Hopefully as more sites like this crop up, businesses will realize that the cost of not listening to their customers is actually detrimental to their quest for profit.