We have been working closely with a client to develop a reactive response protocol for identifying reviews from dissatisfied customers, addressing their concerns, and delivering service corrections. After four months of active listening, we found the majority of negative reviews occur on two consumer complaint sites; of 118 issues identified, 54% appeared on PissedConsumer.com, and 16% appeared on ConsumerAffairs.com.
There are three basic types of consumer review sites:
- Consumer Reviews and Ratings – These sites are distinctive in that they require contributors to rate the business, often on a scale of poor to excellent, or 1 to 5 stars, as part of their written review. Built around the idea of customers helping customers, the rating gives a quick read of the company, while the written reviews detail strengths and weaknesses, and dole out advice. Consumer rating sites often allow users to rate the helpfulness of the reviews they find on the site, thus shepherding the overall trustworthiness of the content. Examples: Yelp or Rate It All
- Consumer Awareness – These sites were developed to provide objective third party reviews of product or service strengths and weaknesses, as well as provide general consumer education. Many of these sites have grown out of long-standing, well-reputed publications that have been trusted by consumers and journalists alike. Example: Consumer Reports and Edmunds.
- Consumer Complaint Sites – Unlike their digital cousins, complaint sites have only two purposes, to provide consumers with grievances a soapbox on which to vent, and to profit from those grievances.
Businesses battling the parasitic effect of consumer complaint sites find themselves up against a daunting challenge. For starters, their names can instill a sense of paranoia in a consumer before they even read a review, for certainly nothing on pissedconsumer.com can be good. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to most visitors, consumer complaint sites are for-profit entities. They generate revenue primarily through advertising with Google AdWords and other ad networks, they sell business reputation management services, which I’ll touch on again later, and Pissed Consumer even goes so far as to charge users to feature their complaints. Called preferred positioning, the site promises greater visibility by other consumers and better chance of being contacted by the company for resolution in exchange for “a small fee”. I find it hard to imagine any consumer would pay for this so-called service; although I suspect a competitor might see it as a viable defamation tactic.
While I am no fan of these profit tactics, my greatest concern with consumer complaint sites is that in this age of customer-to-business dialogue facilitated by social media, consumeraffairs.com and pissedconsumer.com effectively amputate opportunities for true dialogue.
ConsumerAffairs.com does not provide a response mechanism for companies that want to reach out to, and solve the problems of, dissatisfied customers. Nor do they provide the ability to comment on individual postings. They have one form: a complaint form. Businesses who wish to respond to user reviews are instructed to use the complaint form. All complaints are screened by moderators before publishing, and my experience has been that company responses do not get published.
Pissed Consumer allows commenting, which provides businesses with the opportunity to respond within the thread to both the complaint’s original author and others who have commented on that thread. Unfortunately, comments are not tied back to user accounts, even when a user is logged in at the time of submission. This prevents readers from viewing other activity by the author. Notification of follow-up activity is also wanting. Both businesses and users are forced to manually search for responses to their posts.
ConsumerAffairs.com and Pissed Consumer do promote reputation management as premium services, enabling businesses to respond directly to consumers, but they are secretive about the features and benefits of these premium services. To find out more, I had to fill out a contact form and wait to be contacted by a sales representative. When Pissed Consumer called, I quickly discovered that they would not talk to me because they “don’t do business with agencies”. Pissed Consumer will deal only with the actual company that complaints are against and require a signed non-disclosure agreement before discussing any of their premium services. I advocate that companies manage social and customer service internally for greater authenticity, but agencies help clients by vetting service prior to recommending them. If you won’t talk to me, I cannot, in good conscious, recommend your services to our clients.
I’ll admit it, I felt affronted by this exchange with Pissed Consumer, but I hope that you are too. As businesses adopt social media to deliver customer service, consumers will begin looking carefully at how companies are responding to negative reviews. I firmly believe that sites that don’t provide a response mechanism do a disservice to customers who are looking to answer the question “if I have a problem, will the company help me resolve it?”
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Heather – Great post. We were just discussing these sites with a customer a few days. I’d be interested to see if you guys reviewed the BBB site and their dialog loop. They are another site that is monetizing consumer complaints. While they offer a way to moderate the discussion between consumers and the business (for a fee), they don’t provide an effective way to deal with false negative feedback, nor do they post the consumer/business dialog, but simply refer to complaints as “open” or “resolved”.
It will be interesting to see how the consumer awareness and complaint sites evolve over the next few years. As consumers adopt more of the review and rating sites, I’m not sure the complaint sites won’t provide much of a service or gain the level the authenticity and traction to be trusted.
Thanks for sharing your experience with these sites.
Excellent post! It’s interesting how tight-lipped PissedConsumer.com is about their transactions, and yet people feel as though they are the only site to trust. At my internet marketing firm, we have a client that is consistently ranked below PissedConsumer.com on search engine queries because of the constant fresh content that goes up on PissedConsumer, despite the fact that it’s mostly random users arguing with each other and has nothing to do with the business.
On my company blog, we talk about what PissedConsumer is doing right and what they are doing wrong. Check it out at http://www.trimarksolutions.com/inside/internet-marketing/how-is-pissedconsumer-com-unfairly-affecting-your-companys-online-reputation/.
Pissed Consumer is a vile site hiding behind CDA 230 to allow false and malicious slander on their site. Harmful defamatory informatiuon is just fine with them as long as its about a brand and the rankings they recieve from Google for their subdomains drives traffic to their ads. They are not a consumer affairs site they simply allow anyone to post anything on their site to drive traffic. They are a link farm set up to deliberately game Google’s results for brand names to make them money. They will not respond to any requests to discuss slander and defamation no matter how false and harmful it is. In fact there is no way to contact them at all. They pretend there is but try it and see. Hoepfully Google will investigate their spam SEO activity soon and ban them again this time I hope Google has the good sense to ban them for good instead of the temporary ban they placed on them last time. The only two consumer affairs sites you can trust are my3cents and complaintsboard. Both sites allow a dispute process without any legal fees and if the complaint is false and you can prove it they will remove the content.