Consumer Complaints Get New Power on the Web
Eastman Kodak, the camera company, resigned from the Council of Better Business Bureaus last week, three months after the council started expulsion proceedings against the company. Kodak, a founding member of the industry organization that promotes ethical business practices, said the council incorrectly reported on its website that Kodak had failed to respond to consumer complaints.
In the past, those complaints might have languished in obscurity. Today, consumer websites allow disgruntled shoppers to complain publicly, and companies like Kodak can't ignore them. Companies often respond–by denying the allegations, apologizing, or changing their policies–out of concern that posted comments will scare away potential customers.
"The Internet has made it much more effective to complain," says Linda Sherry, director of national priorities for Consumer Action, a nonprofit that helps consumers file complaints. "It used to be, if you had a complaint, you wrote to the company, and your little complaint probably just ended up in a stack of paper somewhere. Now, a company can be rather embarrassed by something like this."
In Kodak's case, the Better Business Bureau website reported that it had received almost 200 complaints about the company over the past three years. More than 80 were for product quality, and the bureau reported that Kodak did not respond to most of them.
Barbara Pierce, Kodak spokeswoman, says the company did respond to customers but didn't inform the bureau about the responses because the bureau had reported inaccurate information in the past. In a statement, Kodak chief privacy officer Brian O'Connor said, "The presence of a third-party organization between Kodak and our customers is bureaucratic and unproductive."
Kodak isn't the only company to find itself scrutinized after online complaints. Last summer, when the blog Consumerist.com posted the audio of a consumer trying to cancel his AOL account by phone with a customer service representative who almost didn't let him, it got picked up by other media outlets and eventually led to an apology from the company.
"It brought to light that this was going on, that a rep was behaving in this way. It was huge for us. We couldn't not take a look at our policies," says AOL spokeswoman Sarah Matin. She adds that the company emphasized to its customer service representatives that it didn't tolerate the kind of behavior showcased in the audio clip.
"A lot of companies are beginning to pay attention to the online consumer niche," says Max Spankie, founder of www.my3cents.com, which connects unhappy consumers to companies. He says about 100 companies have registered with the site so they can respond directly to complaints.
While complaint websites can be useful, Susan Grant, vice president for public policy at the National Consumers League, warns consumers against believing everything they read on them. "That's subjective, raw information that hasn't been vetted by anybody. It may or may not be accurate," she says.
Websites have different standards when it comes to checking complaints before posting them. The Better Business Bureau posts only complaints that have checked out as legitimate after filing them with companies. Consumerist.com applies a "gut" check before posting stories, and other sites allow consumers to post their complaints without editing.
Jean Ann Fox, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America, says that if consumers want an investigation or some kind of legal action to be taken against the company, then they should take their complaint to their state attorney general or local consumer protection office. "If consumers don't report [to public officials] ... then your complaint experience doesn't become part of law enforcement and decisions about regulations and legislation," she says.
James Hood, editor of ConsumerAffairs.com, a site that lets consumers post complaints, acknowledges the limits of consumer websites. "We can't stop them. But we can expose it," he says.