Complainer Emptor! When Does Online Rage Become Unfair?

“Give enough people a computer and a mouse,” Walter Mossberg said, “and you’re bound to get garbage online.”

That was 15 years ago, when Mossberg was the principal technology writer for The Wall Street Journal, and before social media became a powerful cudgel for verbal assault. Today, people also hurl anger and its byproducts into cyberspace, including complaint, criticism, fulmination, accusations, false statements, diatribe, harangues, and revenge. Bad Customer Experience (CX) fuels much of the vitriol. And for good reason: “The percentage of complainants who felt they got NOTHING as a result of complaining [through company-provided channels such toll-free call centers] increased from 47% in 2011 to 56% in 2013, according to the 2013 Customer Rage Survey.

Social platforms offer the perfect medium for exasperated consumers to get things off their chest. Click to complain! In fact, “posting information on the web about customer problems has almost doubled since 2011.” – a key finding from the Rage Survey. Companies collect the output, a digital slop of anguished storytelling and opinion, and place it in sterile repositories for data scientists to mull over. Marketers just call it negative sentiment, which sounds kinder than “I hate Internet Explorer.”

“Unfortunately, with all of that complaining, the implications of customer complaint behavior for organizations have been examined far less often. Yet, how an organization responds to a complaint can have a major impact on its customer’s post-complaint consumer behavior, from re-purchase intentions to likelihood to engage in word-of-mouth activities, and it may even affect the valance of the word-of-mouth message,” says Moshe Davidow, a professor at the University of Haifa, and a prominent researcher in corporate complaint resolution.

In 2013, nearly $76 billion of consumer revenue was at risk as a result of problems with products and services, according to the Customer Rage Survey. That’s the same amount as the 2015 worldwide revenue forecast for all tablet computers, the third largest consumer electronics category, behind TV’s and PC’s. “Companies are losing most of this revenue given the high levels of dissatisfaction with corporate complaint handling practices. Even though companies have substantially increased their spending on handling customer complaints, complainant satisfaction in 2013 is still no higher than in the 1970’s.”

When customers air this dirty laundry in public, revenue risks escalate. “Most research supports the idea that complainers on social media will complain to the company first, and only if they don’t get a proper response do they go on social media. In other words, if you want to minimize the damage of a social media complaint, it starts with handling the complaint internally, and then it won’t get to social media,” Davidow wrote me in an email.

Complainer emptor. Companies have responded with an effective antidote: sue the complainer. “In 2012, a Washington DC-based contractor sued a Fairfax [Virginia] woman for $750,000 over her one-star takedown of his work on her home. And the Virginia Supreme Court is expected to decide soon whether Yelp will be required to turn over the names of anonymous users who disparaged Alexandria’s Hadeed Carpet Cleaners,” The Washington Post reported in March, 2015. In April, the court returned its verdict: Yelp is not legally obligated to share the identities of anonymous online reviewers.

In another case, a Yelp reviewer, Jennifer Ujimori, might have to pay $65,000 for her comment, “In a nutshell, the services delivered were not as advertised and the owner refused a refund.” The owner Ujimori referred to, Colleen Dermott of Dog Tranquility, based in Burke, Virginia, disagreed. She sued Ujimori, claiming that her statements posted on Yelp were inaccurate and caused Dog Tranquility to lose sales.

The case balances two rights: freedom of speech versus freedom from defamation. “People should be free to express their feelings about their service providers. Companies using the legal system to silence their critics has a chilling effect on First Amendment rights,” Ujimori said. Dermott countered that the contract Ujimori signed had a no-refund clause, and that she offered a credit for future services, and other accommodations, but Ujimori rejected all of them. “[The negative review] had a significant impact in that I’m a small-business owner,” Dermott said. “I have to rely on these review sites as a major source of advertising.” The wife of a soldier, Dermott is raising two children, and trains dogs for assisting veterans with PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Whose right is right? The court will decide.

“Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open content platforms on the internet . . . The foundations of the Internet were laid on free expression, but the founders just did not understand how effective their creation would be for the coordination and amplification of harassing behavior,” Ellen Pao, former Interim Chief Executive of Reddit, wrote in a July 17 editorial, The Ugly Side of the Internet. The recipient of withering online abuse, Pao spoke from experience.

“It’s got no signs or dividing lines and very few rules to guide.” When songwriter Robert Hunter wrote New Speedway Boogie in the ’60’s, his lyrics were prescient about social media etiquette. Consider this vignette from The Ethicist in The New York Times:

“My wife and I recently stayed at a very good hotel in South Beach, Miami. We were generally happy there until our third day, when our room was broken into and we were burglarized. Luckily, our out-of-pocket losses were only $100 or so. The hotel moved us to another room but seemed to show little concern beyond that. In the end, I made a huge stink and they refunded us one-half of our stay. I made no promise to not mention this in the online reviews of the property. My wife wants us to post online reviews about the burglary and the hotel’s response. I think it’s unethical to do this after they more than made good on our misfortune. Who is right?”

Good question. In response, legal scholar Kenji Yoshino wrote, “The thing that tips me in favor of writing is the responsibility to third parties. Is it unethical to withhold this information from other people who might want to stay at this hotel if the hotel is going to take a lackadaisical attitude toward burglaries? That would make me lean toward saying that it would be ethical to write the review. I’m just not sure that I’m willing to say that it would be unethical not to write the review.”

That’s a circuitous way to say, “I’m ambivalent.”

If you want clearer guidance, go with what author Amy Bloom wrote: “I don’t think that everybody in the world who stays at a hotel has an ethical obligation to write a review about everything that happens there. I couldn’t stand to receive all that information.”

Do public customer complaints asphyxiate revenue? Yes, if you own Dog Tranquility. No, if you’re United Airlines. The granddaddy of negative online rants, United breaks guitars – which had 17 million views on YouTube – produced nary a revenue hiccup. As of December, 2014, United flew 27.2 million revenue passenger kilometers, second only to American on the list of global air carriers. The transgression didn’t malign United as an enemy of the arts, and it didn’t thwart the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from retaining United as its official airline. “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on,” Robert Frost said. If he were alive today, he would fly United, too.

“Did you see the video that surfaced [in 2011] of a delivery person throwing a computer monitor box over a customer’s fence? Augie Ray asked in a blog, How Powerful is Social Media Sentiment Really? “Which delivery service was it, and did you purposely stop using them after seeing the clip? Answers: FedEx and no.”

Even though consumer outrage can be ephemeral, vendors are plenty jittery. And increasingly litigious. Complaining through social media has spawned a new legal beast, called a non-disparagement clause. The Union Street Guest House in New York used this one, which Colin Shaw wrote about on CustomerThink in August, 2014:

If you have booked the Inn for a wedding or other type of event anywhere in the region and given us a deposit of any kind for guests to stay at USGH there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review of USGH placed on any internet site by anyone in your party and/or attending your wedding or event. If you stay here to attend a wedding anywhere in the area and leave us a negative review on any internet site you agree to a $500 fine for each negative review.

Imagine your Aunt Diane, who you never wanted to invite to your daughter’s wedding, writing in a Yelp review, “The meal was fine, but the wine did not live up to the sommelier’s recommendation.” She just cost you an additional $500.

A less-wordy example mentioned in another article has even broader reach:

Any disputes between the parties remain confidential. Customers shall not make or encourage others to make any public statement that is intended to, or reasonably could be foreseen to, embarrass or criticize the company or its employees, without obtaining prior written approval from the company.

These contractual restrictions, often embedded into lengthy customer contracts, have provoked legislators. The Consumer Review Freedom Act, introduced in September, 2014, aims “to make it illegal for businesses to penalize customers who write negative reviews on Yelp or other online review sites. The bill was motivated by several examples of companies attempting to dissuade people from writing honest reviews by slipping non-disparagement clauses in their consumer contracts,” according to the website of Eric Swalwell (D-CA), one of the co-authors of the legislation.

Last year, California became the first state to approve a law that protects online reviews. “No consumer should ever face penalties for voicing their opinions on the services or products they have purchased, and California law is now clear that no company has the ability to silence consumers,” the bill’s author, Assemblyman John Perez (D – Los Angeles), said.

Healthy economies depend on informed consumers, who, in turn, depend on free speech. Non-disparagement clauses protect businesses, but they throttle conversation. While getting government off our backs makes popular rhetoric, these bills are vital for ensuring that prospects and customers have balanced information. After all, corporate communications – even from the world’s most ethical companies – are, at best, distortions. “Frankly, I think there’s a special place in hell for someone who markets a product and says it will cure Alzheimer’s,” Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) said. Stifling conversations about customer experiences makes everyone gullible to marketing hype.

But what protections should business owners have? Reviews foster transparency, but they spread plenty of misinformation, too. How fair is it for a customer to post an online complaint when she is misinformed or won’t accept amends, as the owner of Dog Tranquility contends? The financial harm to a company can be considerable. And the risk that a company could be driven out of business through a sustained campaign of misleading negative reviews is not theoretical. “People that want to distress other people can now do it in the comfort of their own home,” said Michelle Drouin, an Indiana University psychology professor who studies technology. “It has less repercussions than harassment offline, and the Internet allows for this emotional distance between the harasser and the victim . . . the anonymity and connectivity of the Internet have created a ‘sadist’s playground.'”

The best advice: De-escalate grumbling – before it turns into public rage. “It would be a lot cheaper in the long run, just to make sure the customer is happy, I mean isn’t that what it is all about?” Davidow wrote in his email. “No hassles, no runarounds. Just a whole lot of happy customers spreading positive word of mouth.”

Leaving only lawyers to complain.