Unless you have been under a rock, or on a different planet, you probably have heard a little about the Jeff Jarvis/Dell saga. This has created quite a stir in Dell I would imagine. The reason it caused such a stir probably had to do with the fact that Jeff Jarvis has a very large readership.
What happens to that same type of message when your readership is less, when perhaps you only have a few hundred readers a day? Does the same phenomena happen? Can a grass roots storm the likes of the one against Dell be started with a little guy?
I’m talking about the nightmare my friend John had recently with his cell phone provider. It seems that AT&T and Cingular are having some growing pains and they have made an enemy in one of their customers. He has blogged his experience that spanned a month. Can this one blogger make a difference? Can this bad experience make a difference? The answer to that has yet to be seen, but if you are the marketing people at Cingular, I wonder if you are going to read an RSS feed for his post? Not only has he mentioned his horrendous experience, but I have just pointed my readership to his bad experience. Perhaps one of my readers will want to use this example of customer service and blogging on their blogs, and a virus of bad reviews are suddenly cross referenced to the posts here and there. Now we have a movement and momentum grows to the point of a grass roots level that is beginning to poison the company’s reputation.
Perhaps Verizon a competitor gets wind (through a simple RSS search for feeds about their competitor) of the post and they mention it to a few of their employees as an example of what can happen when a company creates one bad experience for a customer. Then those employees begin to tell their friends and family about the example. Suddenly the company has an epidemic on their hands. Can this happen? Is it possible that a little voice in the blogosphere can start a storm the likes of which could cripple a business? I for one would like to see that happen. The power of blogs can be to your advantage or they can be a bee under your bonnet.
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We are currently looking for another cell phone service and have been comparing the ‘promises’ of several companies. After reading John’s blog entry (I am one of his MANY regular readers) I have definitely decided NOT to go with Cingular, even though Cingular was one of our top three ‘finalists’ in our search. The actual experience of someone I trust far outweighs any promises a company might make on paper.
Well, tell me what to do to participate in the “cascade.” Maybe link John’s piece and urge everybody else to do the same?
Funny, I just read about horrendous customer service problems with Cingular on another blog:
http://tampateacher.blogspot.com/2005/08/wireless-woes.html
I’m all over a tea party. I hate telecommunications conglomerates. Problem is, I haven’t found one to be any better than another. I’ll sign anything. In lieu of that, I’ll briing my PVC and ammonia…
I was the second person to comment at this post of John’s. My sister had just encountered something very similiar with Cingular. She chose to have the service disconnected and will pay her dues to them so as to not deal with them.
Oh my yes! Dell has their outsourced phone nazis calling me from India to collect on their promise.
I say come and get me.
Thanks for the attention to my misery, Jim. The thing that really snaps my thong is the fact that they have offered no real monetary restitution. I think they should at least offer to refund the activation fees on the two phones that took three days to activate.