The method that angry passengers
used to find each other, organize and respond after being stuck on
grounded American Airlines aircraft for as long as nine hours
should serve as a warning for airlines and other travel companies:
Prepare to be blogged.
Thanks to the
Internet, and blogs in particular, disgruntled customers have more
power than ever.
The revenge of the
angry consumer is nigh if it isn't here already, and airlines and
travel companies that aren't prepared for it had better get
started.
"One angry customer
can do more damage now than he could in the past," warned Nathan
Gilliatt, who has his own blog and runs Social Target, a media
research and consulting company in Apex, N.C. "The difference now
is that the unhappy customer can have an audience, where in the
past they were an individual unhappy customer. [In the past] they
probably told their friends. Now they can tell the
world."
The American Airlines
situation is instructive.
The passengers on the
American flight did not exchange information while they were stuck
on the grounded aircraft (although at least one of them did use a
cell pone to call a television reporter to alert the news station
about what was happening).
Instead, Helen Anders
wrote about Flight 1348 on the "Anders Meanders" travel-related
blog she writes for the Austin American-Statesman.
The blog, as most
are, allows readers to post comments on each entry. Several angry
customers from Flight 1348, and other American flights on which
passengers were stuck for more than three hours, posted comments.
Passenger Kate Hanni posted her e-mail and phone number for others
to contact her.
From that small
beginning, an angry and highly motivated Hanni began the movement
-- its effectiveness is still to be determined -- to push for an
airline passenger rights bill in Congress.
Hanni became the de
facto spokeswoman for the aggrieved passengers, appearing on
nationally broadcast news shows.
The newly formed
Coalition for an Airline Passengers' Bill of Rights has started a
blog and a Google group discussion board of its own to try to build
up public support for its effort.
Leaving aside whether
American responded with enough speed, contrition or compensation
for the long groundings, the nature of the passenger response
should be a wake-up call to travel companies that have not already
heard the alarm.
American is hardly
the first-case of blog-enabled revenge. Perhaps the most famous
angry blogger is Jeff Jarvis. In the summer of 2005, he began
posting complaints about Dell's customer service on his blog. His
long-running postings about "Dell Hell" became a widely known
symbol of what the company later acknowledged was its deteriorating
customer service.
So what is a company
to do?
For one, the ability
of consumers to air their grievances to a worldwide audience has
made it more important than ever that companies respond quickly and
appropriately to consumer complaints.
It's probably not
realistic, however, to believe even the best companies can identify
or satisfy every unhappy customer before he or she tries to exact
revenge via the Internet. That means they need to be proactive by
closely and continually monitoring what's being said about them in
cyberspace, or hiring someone to monitor it for them, so they can
nip trouble in the bud.
Gilliatt told me a
smaller company could do this in-house with off-the-shelf software,
but larger companies with well-known brands, such as airlines,
would be overwhelmed trying to do this on their own.
Some public relations
firms include a tracking service, but Gilliatt said there also is a
new crop of specialized companies that use their own technology to
monitor and analyze what is being said about a particular company
in blogs and other online venues. These companies search for
comments but also categorize them, analyzing which bloggers are the
most influential. For global businesses, finding a company that can
read blogs in other languages can be important, he
added.
Gilliatt currently is
researching companies that track blogs, and said he already has
identified about 45 of them.
Whatever method a
company uses to track what is being written about them, Gilliatt
urges them to use something.
"Companies need to be
aware that this stuff is happening now," he said, "and they need to
be able to pay attention."