Market Sentinel is currently pitching to a large company with a prominent detractor. Two thirds of the traffic his campaigning site is getting, he says, comes from people putting the words “[product] problems” or “[product] complaints” into Google.

The company’s customer service FAQ is absent from the top ten results of this search.

This effectively means that the detractor is doing the job of customer service for the company. He is qualifying the customer service experience, and providing the answers to the consumers. This is not a healthy situation for the company concerned.

This is anecdotal evidence for something we all experience. A couple of days back I hired a Smart car. The highly-sophisticated, semi-automatic gearbox stalled and left me marooned in teeming rain in heavy traffic. The rental company couldn’t explain the problem and struggled to find me with a replacement vehicle. When I came home I put “Smart Car” gearbox problem into Google and found

http://www.atomised.org/smartcar/faq.php

Yes, it’s the unofficial FAQ - not authorised by Mercedes but highly useful and entertaining. It turns out that either I wasn’t pressing the brake, or the brake microswitch was faulty. Good for me to know, good for the rental guy to know.

Brand owners have two options to make good use of of customers (and maybe resellers) putting their problems into Google:

1) provide a highly-functional, highly indexed FAQ

2) find a way of harnessing their community of users to provide this kind of customer service (think http://share.skype.com)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 27th, 2005 at 5:57 am and is filed under search engine marketing, Customer service, search engine optimisation, Online detractors, PR, Blogging, Market Sentinel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.