TellOscar Blog Digests Complaints
Post by Robert Campbell on Oct 31, 2009
Last week, Smojoe built a beautiful WordPress blog for TellOscar.com.
If you haven’t heard about this place yet, let me explain Canada’s first user driven complaints website. This web destination might be better described as a customer service reports index, and by that I mean a place that lists both good and bad stories; both compliments and complaints can be recorded.
But very few people bother to write nice things or record pleasant observations here. No, this site runs on complaints and preserves warnings to consumers researching specific goods and services.
How does TellOscar work?
If you owned a business, and suddenly found your beloved establishment written up in TellOscar’s archives, you’d do whatever possible to get the problem resolved. Am I Right? You’d pay whatever fees necessary to access the forum and respond to the complainer, personally one on one. I’m certain you’d pay money to make them happy (or at least keep them quiet), and that’s exactly what Tell Oscar wants you to do: That’s the business model. When this website gets busy, all of Canada’s biggest corporations will pay a monthly access fee to be able to respond one on one with their unhappiest customers.
Why TellOscar works?
As a savvy consumer, I get frustrated with cut rate customer service departments, foreign call centers and automated telephone messages. People who naively write emails to managers, or letters to head office should not be surprised if their correspondence vanishes into a corporate chasm. TellOscar works its wonders because the complaint is so public it embarrasses the subject into action.
What about Twitter? Isn’t that already the world’s largest complaints website?
Unlike Twitter, which limits each entry to a 140 characters, TellOscar.com lets writers enter pages of details. There is no limit, and no expiry date. The system preserves each submissions in the vault forever, until they’re resolved, and even that data is archived for perpetuity. Also noteworthy is TellOscar’s primary focus on Canadian consumers – they have representatives who deal directly with Canadian manufacturers, merchants and service providers and are positioned as impartial advocates for conflict resolution.
Introducing the TellOscar Blog
TellOscar’s new blog is what every customer service blog should be – its the primary conduit for communicating new information and insight into the particulars of a business, and reflections on an industry in general. This simple WordPress blog will digest news media, profile other authors and experts and showcase some of the more vitriolic complaints that have been submitted to the site. There’s lots of very interesting content on this website, and the blog can bring even more attention to the best of the best user submitted complaints.
Check out these remarks filed under bad customer service. These are heartbreaking stories. I want you to look at this alleged assault at McDonalds. Imagine if you were the general manager, and you became aware of this story by reading about it online, what would you do? It’s interesting to learn how two different managers at that franchise became more and more eager to find resolution. They fired the employee, offered coupons, and finally asked what else they could possibly do to get the issue resolved…
Creative complainers are every corporation’s worst nightmare, and with its spiffy new blog, TellOscar.com has just become an even more powerful place to complain.
