Rant Heard Round The World - Heather Rast

a white paper by
BUILDING BRANDS WITH VERVE AND MOXIE
Heather Rast
heather@insightsandingenuity.com
www.insightsandingenuity.com
facebook.com/insightsandingenuity
heatherrast (skype)
@heatherrast
Marketing ideas, methods and

The Rant Heard ‘round the World: content designed to resonate with
Can We Find Satisfaction on the Internet? consumers. Build your brand
to grow your business.
Customer satisfaction and loyalty are inextricably intertwined. In our value-conscious,

post-recession world, maintaining good relationships with existing customers is a business
imperative if there is any hope to hold a measure of protection against price-driven
competitive strategies. The relationships exist on the premise of quality products and services,
meeting functional needs and accessible, responsive service – delivered consistently, across all
channels and touch points.
With adoption of social media tools on the

rise, companies have greater opportunity
to gather valuable feedback from users and
prospects. But social access is a two-way
street, and the risk of exposure [negative
sentiment] is inherent. It must be
managed as well as used constructively, for
demonstrating customer-centric behavior
is the only method for propping up grand
mission statements.
What happens when something goes wrong? When a company makes a mistake that leads
to customer dissatisfaction? What recourse do consumers have to efficiently resolve issues?
What can companies do to soften any damage suffered online? Moreover, what should brands
do to stay in front of sentiment and channel learnings into organizational and operational
improvements?
I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Ever have those days where the planets fall out of alignment and Sagittarius is in the house of
Jupiter? Your “no peas, please” chicken fried rice comes with – you guessed it – extra peas.
You’re stranded, cashless, with a blinking cell battery but no luggage (“It’s in Topeka, ma’am.”)
because your reservation was snatched out from under you. Or maybe you were sold a lemon
of a laptop by a condescending techno-teen who refused your discount code.
Maybe it was just that one time. Or maybe your grievance with a particular company/
restaurant/store is long standing. You may be frustrated because there’s seemingly no
recourse.
Heather Rast
a white paper by heather@insightsandingenuity.com
Page 2 heatherrast (skype)
@heatherrast

Like a good duck, though, you completed the contact form, mailed in a copy of your receipt
and left messages with the supervisor. Then you finally resorted to ranting on Twitter and
pounded out a blog post in hopes the earworms were listening. In return, all you got was
silence.
So what next?
Get Your Groubal On

There’s a new way for customers to get their injured
voices heard loud and clear. Groubal, a free “complaint
as a petition” platform, acts as a repository for customer
grievances against any company, large or small. Groubal
may also facilitate dialogue between the customer and the
company against which the petition is lodged. It’s a sort-of
cousin to the local review site Yelp and the social support
site Get Satisfaction.
How Groubal Works:

• A complainant lodges a petition on Groubal, then shares it via social media to solicit
his/her network support.
• Groubal vets the petition; verified petitions become live and indexable via search
engines.
• After petition signatures begin stacking up, Groubal notifies the company a petition has
been lodged. Seeks answers to petitioner’s allegations.
• Reps from companies which wish to respond to petitions are verified (must hold a
position with compensatory capacity). No CSRs, only persons in authority roles can
respond.
• Representatives may respond in the comment stream with official statements and/or
offers of restitution.
• The petition remains open/idexable in order to maintain a historical accounting of
events.
• The Groubal can be re-activated if others add themselves to the petition later down the
line (think chronic incidences).
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

“The average citizen is disadvantaged in many ways by big business,” said Groubal CEO
Robert Donner during our recent interview. “They can’t cut through the red tape and the
apathy. Groubal helps level the playing field.”
It’s The Economy, Stupid

When the US economy hit a brick wall in late 2007, everything shifted. Buying. Selling.
Sourcing. Servicing. Many companies slashed frontline staff in an effort to stave off balance
sheet hell.
But frontline staff makes up part of the overall experience one has with a corporate brand, a
very real part of everyday interactions. Staff reductions led to – surprise – higher incidence of
customer dissatisfaction across many industries. There were fewer people there to get the call.
Those that did were overworked, and it showed in their call handling and attitudes toward
issue resolution. As cost-cutting measures led to other departments getting cut, resources and
attention continued to shift from customer-oriented efforts. Who had time to think about the
bird in the hand? Sell, sell!
Customer service and other front line positions are seldom viewed as a long-term strategic
investment, a very real problem. The often-cited Zappos is one notable exception; Tony
Hsieh has said they’re a service company, not an apparel e-tailer. Is there any surprise they’re
ranked 4.6 out of 5 stars by their customers? Unlike Zappos, many other companies approach
customer service as an operational necessity rather than a resource with tremendous potential
to influence public opinion and image.
Looking For Satisfaction In All The Wrong Places
In the past, aggrieved customers may have looked for recourse through
the Better Business Bureau or made an attempt to claw up the chain of
command alone. These inherently slow-moving avenues keep customers
feeling isolated and even ineffectual, without much influence over
outcomes. It’s David against Goliath, and often times the big guy wins,
further adding insult to our injury.
Social media and platforms like Groubal change things. Customers can
project their voices and be heard across the four corners of the universe
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

through Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, blogs and other outposts. We’ve

all experienced/committed Random Acts of Rant within our
streams. Cathartic as it may feel, those outbursts are a little like
shouting into the wind. Few people - maybe not even the right people -
hear them.
There’s a chance that Groubal may help redirect the wind to get
customer voices unified and flowing in the right direction. While the success of any single
petition relies in part upon the groundswell of support it receives through signatures and
comments (more voices = more pressure), larger implications emerge when you consider how
Groubal centralizes customer sentiment and brings visibility to the issues.
Losing Lustre
Sometimes a complaint is just that; one guy’s dissatisfaction over the battery life of his eBay-
auction cell phone. That guy still wouldn’t be happy with a 30% increase in performance. His
beef isn’t an indication of a systemic product defect resulting from shoddy R&D work. He’s
just griping.
And yet real incidences of corporate malfeasance, glitches and ambivalence occur every day. So
how can an image-minded company scale to effectively span the entire spectrum of product/
service delivery? People are already talking and now may be Groubaling as well; organizations
have to parse through the wheat and the chaff or risk missing harvest.
There’s A Storm Brewing

“It’s basic PR101,” said public relations counselor Arik Hanson
of ACH Communications when asked how can brands effectively
manage or minimize negative online sentiment. “Companies need
a crisis program before they hit a crisis.” The Minneapolis-based
Hanson went on to say “Many companies are inherently risk-averse.
Some are paralyzed with fear about a public incidence. But unless
the board or C-suite has specifically asked for a crisis plan, marketing
departments hesitate to make the investment. They put the dollars elsewhere. It’s a huge risk,
but they take it.” Apparently it’s all sunshine and ponies until it’s not.
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

“Then it comes down to formulating a factual response, correcting rumors or false information,
and getting word out in the public domain as quickly as possible,” said Hanson.
A more proactive approach, one Hanson recommends, calls for figuring out how to listen to
customers better in order to adopt tactics which lead the conversation around key issues,
supplanting other media as a resource for information. “Ideally, you want to get out in front
of negative online sentiment by being a bit proactive and building up goodwill within your
community,” Hanson advised.
What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Companies consistently demonstrating a high
commitment to service are trusted more than their
counterparts. When an issue arises, those companies
may be more readily forgiven and suffer less damage to
their image.
Planning for the inevitable crisis is critical. It’s equally

important to maintain a constant awareness about
satisfaction and sentiment in order to shape marketing
opinion and operational change.
Frank C. Martin, a market research professional based in Virgina, believes that brands would
be best served by having real verbal conversations with customers as frequently as twice a
year. “Understanding preferences and definitions of quality can help a brand be successful.
You aren’t delivering on customer expectations if you don’t have an accurate accounting of
what they are,” said Martin. Yet in a recent study by MarketTools, 22% of companies surveyed
solicit customer feedback once a year or not at all.
But aren’t we overwhelmed with surveys, many of which are deceptively long, as it is? “It can
be as simple as the question, ‘Would you recommend us to a friend?’” Micro-level qualitative
information can set up larger scale quantitative studies that dive deeper into issues of
importance to customers.
“A platform like Groubal CSI may suggest to a brand that something is going on, but it doesn’t
inform actual decision-making,” said Martin. Information gained from social media tools may
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

supplement and enhance traditional research methods, but don’t replace them. Owning or
having access to the data isn’t enough; companies have to actually use what they learn for the
betterment of the customer leading to benefits for the business.
“It’s Our Policy…”

Even while consumers seek resolution to problems and long
for common courtesy when there’s a glitch, in some cases our
tendency to “lash out” on Twitter or a blog may inadvertently
help widen the gap between companies and our own personal
realities.
There may be too much online noise for a brand to receive

our signal in a meaningful way. The brand may discover the
rant, but resolving scattered occurrences (albeit substantial or
numerous ones) may present operational challenges, even to
companies interested in adopting social commerce principles.
Companies have to discover ways to address the needs of individual customers and roll the
insights upward to discover processes which lead to greater overall customer satisfaction.
Unfortunately, wide-spread adoption of social-based continual process improvement is a long
way off for most companies.
Forrester reports at least 16% of consumers vent about poor customer service interactions
through social channels. Only one out of four business executives report they never or seldom
use customer feedback to change a business process. Again – customers are talking; a small
number of brands are listening; still fewer are actually hearing.
Instead of the random online rant creating limited brand exposure to target audiences (in the
big scheme), a Groubal petition has the potential to gain real traction as people stand up en
masse to say “That happened to me, too! I just didn’t know what to do about it.”
We Need Humans Behind The Handles
Twitter handles and enterprise email software may make it easier for some company
representatives to distance themselves from the publics they serve. The activity on the
interwebs is still too nebulous to grab onto. Social media tools may span geography and aid
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

real-time connections, but the nuance of personal accountability may be lost when it’s the
threat of public exposure which induces a brand to take action, rather than real organizational
value placed on setting wrongs to right. At that point it may be more about putting out fires
rather than internalizing and channeling customer feedback for the collective good.
Other companies may believe themselves too far removed from the customer to reap value
from end user satisfaction-oriented strategies. They don’t “own the relationship” even while
they benefit financially from the arrangement or transactions. This can be the case with
corporate-managed health care, benefits administration or retirement planning when the
provider or agent is more concerned with keeping the company contract than servicing the
employees enrolled in the plan.
Conclusion
Consumers will continue to demand access to and personalized
service from brands. Those brands which place value on creating
high levels of customer satisfaction will be rewarded with positive
word of mouth, the new currency in our socialized world.
Developing a corporate values-driven culture which surrounds

the customer and aided by social media is not without significant
investment. Yet it may prove to yield long-term success powerful
enough to withstand market shifts and economic challenges. It
involves principles and values infused throughout the organization. The total economic
investment should show enduring positive return.
As these companies integrate a social mindset deep into operations and processes, they’re
likely to solidify their positions as leaders in their respective industries.
It won’t be a question as to whether the organizations heard the inevitable online rant. The
expectation to “deliver happiness” will belong to all employees because that’s how the business
operates. Collectively, all employees will take aim at solving problems rather than dousing
fires; the revenues will naturally follow.
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

About Heather Rast

Heather is a customer-centric brand strategist interested in building
stronger relationships between brands and those they serve. She
helps brands shape their communications to target relevance, value,
and emotional fulfillment by focusing on customer needs.
Heather has worked with clients in health care, telecommunications,

food service, retail, eCommerce and utility sectors for 18 years. An
entrepreneur and small business owner, she holds a BA degree from Florida State
University in English and Journalism, and a MA degree from Middle Tennessee State
University in Mass Communications. A prolific reader and writer, she contributes to
several industry blogs.
Through her brand management consultancy, Insights & Ingenuity, Heather partners with

companies to build enduring identities and positioning through brand strategy, content
development, and community management services to drive long-term business value.
Heather Rast
@heatherrast

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a white paper by

BUILDING BRANDS WITH VERVE AND MOXIE

Marketing ideas, methods and

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are inextricably intertwined. In our value-conscious,

With adoption of social media tools on the

I Can’t Get No Satisfaction

Marketing ideas, methods and

Get Your Groubal On

How Groubal Works:

Marketing ideas, methods and

It’s The Economy, Stupid

Looking For Satisfaction In All The Wrong Places

Marketing ideas, methods and

through Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, blogs and other outposts. We’ve

There’s A Storm Brewing

Marketing ideas, methods and

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Planning for the inevitable crisis is critical. It’s equally

Marketing ideas, methods and

“It’s Our Policy…”

There may be too much online noise for a brand to receive

Marketing ideas, methods and

Developing a corporate values-driven culture which surrounds

Marketing ideas, methods and

About Heather Rast

Heather has worked with clients in health care, telecommunications,

Through her brand management consultancy, Insights & Ingenuity, Heather partners with

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