Ed Foster documents more customer service atrocities:

Earlier this year I wrote about Dr. Cem Kaner's meticulous chronicle of his experiences trying to get Alienware to fix, and then ultimately to refund his money for, a lemon of a computer he'd purchased from them. Since then, I've received a rather constant stream of complaints about the company, almost rivaling the gripes generated by the commodity PC vendors like Dell and HP.

What's struck me in particular is how similar many of the reader tales about Alienware are to Kaner's in terms of involving both faulty hardware and unhelpful support. "I would tell my story about my Alienware Area 51M laptop in its entirety, but I would merely be reiterating what happened to Cem Kaner," one reader wrote. "Though I did not have to go through the extremes he did to get his machine functional, I did encounter hardware issues right out of the box. I too experienced delayed delivery issues, hardware issues right out of the box, and failing tech support that knew nothing about PCs or basic networking. In total, the machine was sent back for repair three times. The last time it was in repair for a month and when it was returned to me, the modem was broken, the SD card reader they were supposed to fix was still broken, they had chipped the lid in two places, and the DVD+/-RW has some type of thermal paste that drips into the tray and keeps it from opening properly and potentially ruining media. I travel for a living, this machine was purchased to be my office and for its perceived durability and reliability and excellent tech support. Instead, those of us who purchased an Alienware system have all spent thousands of dollars on machines that often equate to little more than a doorstop or glorified paperweight."

The amazing thing is this - how many companies still think that they can provide shoddy/non-existant service and not get called on it. It's been over a decade since the web started to become a player in this area, but blogs - and what they've done to make personal publishing easy - has really accelerated the empowerment of consumers.

Back in 1995, you could put up a website, but getting a hosting solution (and getting the HTML to the site itself) was a chore - far beyond the level of crap that most people want to deal with. Now, it's simple - there are multiple free blog hosting services, and a variety of low cost ones. You can vent your spleen on the cheap, and getting the content posted isn't complicated.

Before that, bad service didn't get beyond word of mouth - and the national (or even local) media only covered truly bad service, the kind that killed/hurt people, or ended up scamming them out of large sums of cash. Now, word of mouth extends around the globe - sometimes, with a kick from digg, or slashdot, or drudge - in minutes. Even without those kicks, search engines make the complaints far more visible than many people seem to think (witness the sort of tale Foster is relating).

Radio Silence as a strategy doesn't work anymore. Too many people are willing to point out the problems, and they get amplified quickly if it's a common problem. If your customer service stinks, people are going to find out. Sooner than you think.