The Other Side part 2

On Thursday, I posted about Kryptonite,how there is always another side to the story and how the compnay updated its approach to listening to customers. The chapter of Blogging in a Crisis has since been updaed by Robert and Shel.

There’s a few more companies that may be able to take some lessons from Kryptonite. The first is Dell. Jeff Jarvis has been having some problems with them, with a complete lack of customer service. But the story is not confined to a few blogs; Rick Segal overheard a lunchtime conversation:

I happened to be sitting across from a couple of bank tellers from TD Canada Trust, the bank in our building. These two ladies I’d seen before so I knew where they worked.

Lady one: I was going to buy a new Dell but did you hear about Jeff Jarvis and the absolute hell he is going through with them.

Lady two: Yeah, I know the IT guy told me that the cobler blog was recommending we stay away from Dell.

So there we have the story spreading, producing lost sales and bad conversation. Dell is unlikly to get back in their good books without a lot of work. There are lots of comments and opinions agian about Dell not listening, not reacting, not knowing how to relate to customers in these internet-powered days.

But there’s another side to the easy access to information, to postings being indexed and searchable. Sometimes you find a company is listening to its customers, does not like what it hears and reacts in a way that is not what the blogger wants. Jay Goldman posted a comment a his friend Joey deVilla’s blog regarding a local moving company in Toronto. The comment was a warning about some moving compnaies to avoid, one of which was Quick Boys Moving Storage. It appears that the company involved tracked Joey down and requested with menaces that the comment be removed. After originally removing the comments in order to get some time to reflect, the comments and the whole episode including transcripts of the calls are back online. With some rather interesting comments in the new post. So here we have a company that does listen – but carries on with the same attitude regardless.