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November 25, 2003
The customer vigilante files
A customer vigilante is someone driven to upset your business life. At some point your relationship with the customer crossed a line from dissatisfaction to outrage.
The anger that many customer vigilantes feel is palpable. Some will spend days, weeks or months to ensure the rest of the world understands the depth of their frustration. Why? Typically, it's a combination of three reasons:
* Lack of an apology or a sympathetic ear from the business in question.
* Slow or non-existent response to problem resolution.
* Pent-up stress from the problem.
Here are three recent examples of customer vigilantes in action:
1. The spam rager.
Charles Booher is a Silicon Valley programmer who's had it with spam. He allegedly threatened to do nasty things to a company that sent him bundles of unwanted email. With the tide of spam threatening to ruin the viability of email more every day, the frustration that Booher feels is hardly anomalous.
2. The iPod poster.
This short film documents the work of an Apple customer and his one-man guerilla campaign to spray-paint warnings on iPod posters all over a city that looks to be New York. The customer was upset that Apple wanted to charge him $250 to replace a worn-out, unreplaceable internal battery on his 18-month-old iPod.
3. VW schaudenfreude.
A customer of an Illinois Volkswagen dealership was so upset at the treatment she received as a purchaser of a pre-owned Jetta and how the dealer allegedly refused to honor its warranty that she created an elaborate website detailing her story and her efforts to get satisfaction.
What can companies learn from these examples?
1. The democratization of technology makes it incredibly easy for a very upset customer to broadcast his and her displeasure. Never discount the ability of a customer to think creatively about their anger.
2. Buzz about a particularly bad customer experience can spread quickly and easily across the Internet, faster than is possible to imagine. With the growing influence of bloggers who cross-link to one another within days or hours, it can become rather impossible to erase the tracks of a bad customer experience.
3. More than anything, customer vigilantes want to be acknowledged and heard. A company that makes a genuine effort to satisfy a customer who has gone to elaborate and creative lengths like the ones above may be convinced to redeploy their energies toward singing your praises.
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