Do you know who you’re talking to?
Automated disclaimer: This post was written more than 15 years ago and I may not have looked at it since.
Older posts may not align with who I am today and how I would think or write, and may have been written in reaction to a cultural context that no longer applies. Some of my high school or college posts are just embarrassing. However, I have left them public because I believe in keeping old web pages alive—and it's interesting to see how I've changed.
There's an old maxim in retail and customer support: "If the customer has a bad experience, they will tell, on average, 13 other people." I've also heard the number as high as 20. Whatever the actual average, it has certainly been increased in the age of near-instantaneous and geographically-unrestricted communications.
I recently saw a blog entry on the del.icio.us. Check out the paragraphs under the January 3 heading, where he describes how he sent out emails to a number of large listservs and many people on his address book. He got dugg, and his server was clocked at about 1 hit per second.
HP finally responded. Might have had something to do with Granneman posting the email address of a few days. And that's just the people who decided to save the bookmark -- on del.icio.us/popular list that documented one individual's struggles with
So pay attention, industries who depend on customer service and retail: you are talking to the crowd now, not the individual.
No comments yet.
Self-service commenting is not yet reimplemented after the Wordpress migration, sorry! For now, you can respond by email; please indicate whether you're OK with having your response posted publicly (and if so, under what name).