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Forbes Lists Top Corporate Hate Web Sites
windowpain writes "You've seen them. Maybe you've made one, like Walmart-blows.com or Paypalsucks.com. Now Forbes.com has a 'Special Report' devoted to what it considers the best of them. 'The following nine sites--there were ten, but one went unexpectedly dark during the editing of this story--are the crème de la crème of online rage. Note that we substantially cleaned up some of the posts, editing out odd capitulation schemes, iffy grammar and plain incoherence. Apparently blinding anger does not go hand in hand with dotting your i's and crossing your t's.' Maybe this will become an annual thing like the Forbes 400 and the Fortune 500." (I wonder what a capitulation scheme is.)
I like the way this was PR handled from UPS for the website UnitedPackageSmashers.com:
Company Says:
"We do know of the site. Because we live in a free society, people have the right to their opinion, and we recognize that people will use the Internet to voice their opinion. We believe that customers can get much more valuable and accurate information from our site."
Thats much better than a legal notice claiming a violation of some act, and gives them a leg up in my book. On a side note I wonder how forbes has/would handle something like forbessucks.com.
...we were expected to be suprised, but it's not suprising.
Just an example from the Paypal part of the report:
Company Says: "We believe that people have a right to express their opinion. PayPal welcomes constructive criticism from members to help us continue to improve our service through our community discussion boards, chat rooms and Voices program. The problem with complaint sites is that the issues reported are sometimes out-of-date and have long since been resolved. Other times, customers may write complaints on the sites without trying to get their issues resolved through our customer service channels first. As a result, we can't confirm the accuracy of the information on these third-party sites. And we've found that they are not interested in providing a balanced view." (emphasis added)
Why can't they confirm the accuracy of the information?
Sure, they might not know if Customer Service Person A really hung up on a customer, but certainly they can look into some of these issues. Unless they're the one company in the world that doesn't monitor customer service calls. They have access to this information.
Why do they expect the site to be fair and balanced? When I complain to a company, I'm not being fair and balanced. I'm advocating for myself against the company. Yes, I want to reach an equitable solution, but these sites have a lot of people who weren't able to reach that equitable solution.
That's a problem for any company and you'd think they'd actually listen. (Yeah, I know.)
I realize there's a lot of bull on those websites. But at the same time, there are also patterns of problems. No company is perfect, and here is a chance for those problems to get past the customer service filter (who are the problem a certain percentage of the time).
What I don't get is why in the world any company wouldn't say something like "Yes, we're aware of those websites and in fact take their concerns into consideration", even if they don't really mean it. They just write those people off as "Never gonna be customers so skrew it: those people are stupid", but apparently don't realize that those people used to be customers, and other current customers will eventually leave them as well.
"Agreed. I'm surprised that their "forced illegal door search" policy hasn't resulted in a shooting, or at least a firearm being drawn."
Fry's electronics has the same policy, in both cases I just hold up my hand and say "no thank you" as I walk out the door when they try to look in my bags.
If they want to stop me they can, but then i can sue for false imprisonment.
I refuse to be treated like a criminal for shopping at someone's store (even though they do just by trying to stop me at the door).