New York Times Article: March 4, 2001

Customers are fed up, no doubt...By HILARY APPELMAN

There is a way to vent those frustrations, and perhaps to get some results. Disgruntled consumers are a hot commodity on the Internet, where a dozen or more sites have been competing to become the virtual soapbox of choice for tens of thousands of angry customers.

"Do you have a complaint? Want thousands to see it?" Baddealings.com entices. EComplaints.com, meanwhile, has billed itself as "Your chance to fight back," while uGetHeard.com boasts that it is "the easiest way to get HEARD by companies!"

Other sites, like NorthWorstAir.org, IHateStarbucks.com, WeHatePacificBell.com and others with far-less-polite names, stockpile grievances against specific companies. The complaints range from serious ("My less-than-1-year-old refrigerator caught on fire") to minor ("The shrimp basket did not look anything like the TV commercial") to furious ("And so I began my spiral into insanity due to the absolute morons working in the customer service department"). Some are pleas for help; others are outpourings of frustration. But they share a theme: that the people filing the complaints deserve better.

Thomas Sepin, 44, of St. Clair Shores, Mich., said he had spent almost a year trying to have PeoplePC ship a computer before he turned to eComplaints. He said he felt better just by typing the complaint, but then told PeoplePC about his posting and soon received his computer.

"There's something about putting something on the Web, on a public site," said Mr. Sepin, a Ford assembly plant worker. "I felt that at least somebody might see that and think twice."

The sites tend to operate on this model: Customers tell their stories, the site makes them public and, depending on the site, forwards the complaints to the company. Some sites, like TheComplaintStation.com, are little more than bulletin boards. EComplaints encourages companies to post responses on its site, then tracks them. Users can post a follow-up message on how satisfied they are with company responses.

At PlanetFeedback.com, users have filed more than 200,000 letters to corporations. "There's a huge amount of frustration out there," said Pete Blackshaw, the chief executive. "Consumers want an easier way to be heard."

The complaint sites are "filling a void," said Martin Petersen, director of public affairs at Playtex Products who also is treasurer of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business in Alexandria, Va. "People want to reach companies and don't know how to do it."

Many companies say customers are better off contacting them directly. But many of the people turning to complaint sites say they have tried that approach, with little or no success.

"I spoke to 12 different people, including two supervisors," begins a letter on eComplaints, accusing Sprint PCS of failing to honor a sign-up promotion. "They kept forwarding my calls to other departments and occasionally to never-never land."

Monica Evans-Trout, a spokeswoman for Sprint, said the company does not respond directly to Internet complaint sites. Mr. Blackshaw, though, says that filing a complaint with PlanetFeedback makes it easier for consumers to reach the right person at a company. And going public with a complaint, he added, puts more pressure on a company to respond. "The stakes are higher," he said.

Both PlanetFeedback and eComplaints say the majority of their users resolve their complaints. Yet on eComplaints, the only site that regularly posts companies' replies, some companies that had been targets of the most complaints responded to less than 1 percent of the problems, according to response figures on the site. (The companies with the most complaints, at least on eComplaints, were airlines and phone services.)

Companies are unlikely to pay much attention to the complaint sites unless they see an effect on their bottom lines, said Edward D. Gagnon, the president of Customer Service Solutions, a consulting firm in Charlotte, N.C. But if they do not respond, companies may miss an opportunity to win back customers, he added. Sixty-eight percent of lost business is attributable to perceived indifference, Mr. Gagnon said, citing a study by e-Satisfy.com.

"There's nothing more indifferent than not getting a response to your complaint," he said.

For every person who writes a complaint on a site, at least 10 others will read it, said Jennifer Biscoe, the founder of eComplaints. "So it's important for companies to respond and say what they've done to fix the problem, or why they can't," she said.

For people whose problems cannot be resolved, either because the company will not respond or because the complaint is too nebulous, the eComplaints site includes an "i-scream too!" button. Click it, and a bespectacled cartoon figure lets out an anguished bellow.

At Fightback.com, operated by David Horowitz, a consumer advocate, users pay $50 for him to write to companies on their behalf and to follow up if necessary.

At most sites, complaining is free; some sites derive their revenue from licensing complaint-handling software and hope eventually to sell to companies the customer data they compile.

PlanetFeedback, which has sold some data to advertising agencies, offers a fill-in- the-blank form to help customers compose their complaints. ("I am writing to express my frustration/annoyance/anger.") PlanetFeedback invites positive as well as negative feedback, and says that almost half the letters it sends to companies are compliments. The site "grades" companies receiving more than 25 letters.

Generally, companies say that going to a complaint site does not help resolve problems. "When a third party is involved, it only serves to delay getting a response," said Andrew Miller, a spokesman for Howard Johnson's International, which has responded to complaints it has received through eComplaints.

That is not how it looks to Lena West, who operates an Internet consulting firm in Yonkers. After she did not get the deal she thought she had been promised from Budget Rent a Car and company officials seemed indifferent, Ms. West said, she posted the details on eComplaints. By the next morning, she had received an e-mail message from Budget, apologizing and promising to resolve the problem.

"When you have a public forum where you're totally embarrassing these companies, they've got to do something about it," Ms. West said. "It can't be swept under the rug."

Allison Striegel, a Budget spokeswoman, said the company tried to respond to its customers as quickly as possible, no matter how they communicated with the company.

Many companies, including Budget, try to respond to Internet complaints privately. Tom Williams, a spokesman for Wal-Mart Stores, concurred. "If we went to complaint sites or negative sites and attempted to deal with that there," he said, "we'd be energizing something that doesn't need to be energized."