Detroit Now KABC Channel 7 News: Thursday, December 7, 2000

Virtual Complaint Departments By Gary Baker

Are Santa's virtual helpers letting you down this Christmas? If you can't tell it to the jolly old elf himself, do the next best thing - tell planetfeedback.com. The Better Business Bureau is there for you to complain to in the real world and there are a whole host of virtual complaint departments to serve the online world.

Of course, the best place to complain is to the online store itself. But, if that isn't satisfying enough, now you have another outlet for that pent-up frustration. You can even use these sites to complain about "brick and mortar" stores. If fact, you can complain about almost anything.

Does it help? Probably. No store likes to read bad things about their operations and they like it even less when their customers read those things.

Are these sites fair? Maybe. Often you only hear one side of the story and people sometimes stretch the truth. However, some of the stories are pretty believable, while some are truly incredible.

One of the extremely useful parts of these sites is that many of them provide a customer rating system for online and "brick and mortar" stores.

You can also leave compliments about your shopping experience at most of these Web sites. The good news is that the numbers of compliments are running slightly a head of the complaints. It might be that the stores are finally getting better at customer service or maybe it is the positive influence of the holiday season.