It's a cherished truism of customer-service gurus everywhere: "A satisfied customer tells a friend; a dissatisfied customer tells 10." Comforting, too, in its implication of a stealth consumer class, possessed of the ability to bring down neglectful corporations with exponentially damaging waves of negative word-of-mouth. But conspiratorial jabbering hasn't deteriorated sales of Spice Girls CDs, pushed Suddenly Susan or Men Behaving Badly off the air, or stopped people from speed-gobbling BK Big Kings (despite widespread news that the chain had some tragic instances of beef accidentally mixing into its turd patties). It's not just beefeaters but the system itself that's in need of a colonic.
Which isn't to say that people shouldn't complain, or that high-decibel bitching reaps no rewards in this life. They should, and it does, though the payoff should be properly appreciated as individual rather than communal. Squeaky wheels have been known to get their palms greased. Whereas in earlier decades an irate letter to M&M/Mars might yield a two-pound bag of thigh-buttering bliss, these days the best method of placing yourself on the happy end of PR disaster is to take your grievance to the Web.
Paula Moran, the self-styled "Cyber Vigilante," is one such plaintiff who has nurtured a two-year dream of getting paid. The exact nature of her misery is easily inferred from the subhead of her site: "You're in bad hands with AllState." She wuz robbed. But insured. And all AllState delivered - she wails again and again, in half a meg of oceanic spew - was "slimy tricks and lies." Just another victim? So far. Moran details the irony of AllState spending more on attorney fees to fight her claim than the amount of the claim itself, and while it seems intuitive that the same lawyers could apply themselves to litigating her site out of existence, dealing with a solitary pest and handling an infestation are different challenges entirely.
The corollary to the dissatisfied-consumer equation provides the activist spender with a second principle: "Win over a pissed-off shopper, and they're yours for life." A case study for this principle could be made of the Comcast@Home Sucks page, which once charted the Kafka-esque narrative of one @Home user's interminable quest to get his cable modem working. For a brief period, the site was a clearinghouse for aspiring low-pingers whose high-bandwidth dreams were unmatched by Comcast's glitchy reality. Today, the righteous caterwaul is confined to an unlinked historical archive. Instead, fellow whiners get a handy link to COAX: Cable Modem User Online Resource, a sucker with a decidedly different flavor. When former grousers graduate to celebratory tech-spec publishers, it's clear that the rules of customer service have changed not a whit in the transition from atoms to bits.
And so the Paula Moran question becomes not so much one of ultimate satisfaction but of reaction time - how long will it take for justice to drip through the bowels of the digital feedback loop? If they match intelligent agents with a sentient PR machine, perhaps no time at all. And if these spry damage-control specialists succeed in hushing indignant shoppers the moment they switch on the loudspeakers, we may never again wonder, "Where's the beef?" As with all blots on the corporate porcelain, it's been flushed.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
