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Daniel Tynan Any normal person would have run out of patience long before Tim Sorg did. Virtually from the moment Sorg received his Dell Dimension L800r in December 2000, the electrical engineer from Fort Wayne, Indiana, had problems installing software. Programs got corrupted, and the PC grew increasingly crash-prone. So Sorg called Dell tech support--and that's when his troubles really began. A representative told him to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows. Three reformats later, the system still misbehaved. So Dell sent a technician to replace the RAM. This didn't help. The tech returned three times to replace other parts. Still no luck. After four on-site visits, 11 reformats, and more than 40 phone calls, Dell replaced the machine. Sorg turned the new PC on--and it crashed. Worse, Dell claimed that he'd never returned his old PC, even though shipping records showed that someone at Dell had signed for it. So Sorg took his troubles to the Web. In December 2001 his wife, Shirley, filed a complaint at the Better Business Bureau Online. Ten days later Dell called to offer a newer, faster PC. It arrived a week after that. The new machine works adequately. But it's refurbished (the Sorgs had requested a new computer), the fan is noisy, and, Sorg adds, "it doesn't begin to erase the poor way Dell has handled this." (Dell spokesperson Bryant Hilton apologized for Sorg's woes and says the vendor is pleased that the problems were resolved.) It used to be that when a merchant's customers felt they'd gotten a raw deal, they wrote letters to the company president or to the local paper. If they were really steamed, they'd tell their friends. Now they go on the Web and tell the world. According to TARP, an Arlington, Virginia, group that has studied consumers for three decades, customers who've sought online assistance from a vendor and failed to get it are four times more likely to vent their frustrations on the Web--a phenomenon TARP calls "word of mouse." Using the Net to seek advice and share horror stories isn't new: Twenty years ago, newsgroup posts debated the merits of Sony TVs and warned of leaky Volkswagen Rabbits. But the Web has made the process far easier, thanks to dozens of gripe sites where customers can post reports, seek remedies, or exact revenge. Some sites, such as the Better Business Bureau and PlanetFeedback, forward consumer grievances to companies. Others, like The Complaint Station and homegrown "companyXYZsucks.com" sites, publicize gripes in an effort to shame vendors into doing the right thing. These sites promise to make your voice heard. But do they work? To find out, we tested a dozen mediation sites by posting a bogus complaint about a fictional company. We said that we'd paid $49 for a software package called WealthEnhancer 2000 but that the product had never arrived and the company had ignored all contact attempts--the earmarks of a classic Internet scam. To monitor the gripe sites' correspondence with both the "angry customer" and the fictitious company, we directed responses to post office boxes, e-mail accounts, phone numbers, and fax numbers we'd set up. The results? These sites provide no panacea for apoplectic consumers. While most of the sites posted our complaints for viewing by other visitors, a couple never forwarded them to the company. (See the results table.) Two sites contacted our phony company by postal mail; the rest sent an automated e-mail. And e-mail is the least-effective method of getting a company's attention, says Cindy Grimm, TARP's director of benchmarking. Our test was designed to test whether gripe sites really forward complaints to vendors. But that's only half the battle--however you make contact with a vendor, you have to find someone who's willing to make things right. Otherwise, your problem may remain unresolved. See "7 Ways to Win at Whining" for tips on nudging the odds in your favor. Trouble Is Their Business While the process is thorough, the pace can be glacial. The goal is to resolve each claim within 40 working days, says Charlie Underhill, senior vice president of the bureau's dispute resolution division. In our tests, it took the BBB about 10 days to make initial contact with our phony customer and our fictional firm, the second-longest of any site that actually made contact. Underhill estimates that the BBB resolves around 65 percent of disputes submitted to it; that rate jumps to about 87 percent for its member companies. The success rate surpasses 90 percent for firms (like Dell) that belong to BBBOnLine, a program with strict dispute-resolution guidelines, including binding arbitration if the parties can't agree. Unlike the BBB, PlanetFeedback also collects questions and compliments. The clever site lets you rate your mood (from furious to thrilled), post a report, and e-mail it to members of Congress. PlanetFeedback's scorecards are rife with discouraging news about technology companies. At the bottom of the heap are wireless phone providers such as MCI WorldCom and Sprint PCS, which had grades of D and D+, respectively, at press time. PC companies don't fare much better: Compaq, Dell, and Gateway all rated a C-. Meanwhile, two of the most popular products are Krispy Kreme Doughnuts and Mountain Dew. (Perhaps they should rename it PlanetFeedbag.) The site forwards gripes only to the 23,000 companies in its database, so we couldn't test it using our fictional company. Instead, we asked Tim Sorg to post his Dell problem. Three days later he got a canned e-mail from Dell with the phone number he'd called 40 times already. Then again, consumer advocacy isn't PlanetFeedback's primary mission. "The site is really just a teaser," says Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer. "We leverage consumer empowerment to help companies become better listeners." In plain English, that means it sells the data. When you post a comment, the site combines it with other facts--such as how often you buy products and what you spend. (You can decline to provide this info.) The site sells the aggregate data to companies, which use it to gauge public opinion about their products. At least PlanetFeedback has an actual business model that may keep it going--something many of its rivals lack. Some levy a fee; the priciest, Fight Back With David Horowitz, charges $50 per complaint. (When we sought help for our test problem, a Fight Back rep sensibly asked whether we really wanted to spend 50 bucks to recover the $49 we said we'd paid for the software.) GotScammed.com has the strangest business model: The site posts gripes for free and then charges the slammed companies $10 to delete a problem once it's been solved--a practice that isn't mentioned on the site. Most gripe sites run on a shoestring, and many have already vanished, such as MadNow. Tiny budgets and staffs are likely reasons why some of our complaints to other sites fell through the cracks. Accidental Advocates Take Matt LaPrairie. The disgruntled ex-EarthLink employee never intended to become a consumer advocate. But when he found that the domain name www.EarthLinkSucks.net was available, he created a parody site that amusingly mimicked the ISP's home page. He put up the site in April 2001. Since then, LaPrairie says, he's received "hundreds if not thousands" of e-mails from the ISP's customers. He's proud of helping to gain refunds for unhappy EarthLinkers. Last fall LaPrairie got bored with operating the site and offered to sell the domain to EarthLink. The ISP agreed on a price ($500). When LaPrairie read the contract, however, he rejected it. "EarthLink wanted me to sign an agreement saying that I would never make a negative comment about EarthLink--written or verbal," says LaPrairie. "It appeared EarthLink was trying to buy my silence. I was not cool with that." Since then, EarthLink seems to have learned to live with LaPrairie and his site. When we asked for a response, company spokesperson Dan Greenfield replied, "Sure we would like to buy the domain and shut it down. Please tell him our new offer is $50." According to VeriSign, the leading domain registrar, at least 27,000 names in the .com, .net, and .org domains contain the word sucks. Many are owned by corporations hoping to preempt gripe sites. For example, when Andersen Consulting changed its name to Accenture in October 2000, it registered names containing choice suffixes, including sucks, reallysucks, bites, and some too sordid to repeat. Other companies take legal action. In August 2000, aviation giant Lockheed Martin tried to block Web entrepreneur Dan Parisi from owning lockheedmartinsucks.com, asking an arbitration board to hear the matter. Parisi won, and added the name to his stable of 500-odd "sucks" domains, all of which send users to his free-speech forum, www.sucks500.com. But gripe site owners don't always prevail. Media titan Vivendi-Universal won its arbitration case against David Sallen, owner of Vivendiuniversalsucks.com. To elude companies' attempts to stop them, some ticked-off consumers register domain names beyond the reach of trademark law, such as www.untied.com (a clever parody of United Airlines' site). Can speaking out at a grassroots gripe site get your problem resolved? It's not out of the question. Compaq, for example, has a person dedicated to seeking out angry consumers on the Net, says Ann Day, manager of customer support and service. The company usually contacts the owner of an anti-Compaq site and tries to address the issue behind it. "A number of them have voluntarily taken the sites down," Day reports. Dell, on the other hand, doesn't scour the Web for critical sites, says spokesperson Bryant Hilton. Kvetch as Kvetch Can In the end, an angry customer's best friend may be, well, another angry customer. The savviest answers to our fictional exercise came from users who saw our post and responded. Two even called the toll-free number we'd set up to see if it worked. They correctly diagnosed that our imaginary company might be a scam--something that, among the sites themselves, only Fight Back seemed to deduce. Even if a gripe site never gets your beef resolved, letting off steam can be therapeutic. It's also an exercise of your constitutional rights, says Gerald R. Ferrera, a professor of cyberlaw at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts: "The courts usually favor counterculture speech in First Amendment cases." If nothing else, he adds, these sites "allow people to vent. It's better than throwing rocks." And who knows? Sometimes even a virtual rock will hit its mark.
Site Grade Cost1 Confirms
receipt of complaint Posts complaint on site Database searchable by company
name What site did with our gripe: n/a = Not applicable.
Reread the fine print. Is your problem really covered by that warranty? Make sure you're in the right before you start a fight.
The Complaint Station: Features forums on topics from @Home to Zippo lighters. The top gripe getter? America Online. Thegripe.com: Speak out on anything here, but keep it clean--the site posts no profanity. The Rip-Off Report: This ad-rich site features reports on everything from deceptive ads to cheating spouses. Screwed Central: Covers a gamut of grievances and offers a revenge forum. Sucks500: Hundreds of forums on thousands of topics, the most (un)popular of which are government and Microsoft. Call the Cops Consumer Sentinel: If you've been scammed, visit this site, which shares reports of criminal activity with the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI, the Secret Service, and other agencies. Federal Trade Commission: Encountered a business practice that seems unethical or unfair? File a complaint here with the FTC. Internet Fraud Complaint Center: Report incidents and receive alerts through this joint effort of the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center. National Fraud Information Center: Reams of information on how to report fraud, with an emphasis on identity theft and Internet scams. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission: Read about product recalls and report incidents at this site. Photograph by: Andy Snow; Photograph by: Paul Gero
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