Flippy - I Rant, You Read

Sunday, November 19, 2006

early morning

Interesting Marketing Blog

I was roaming around the web, working, wandering, waiting for Leigh-Ann to be ready to go downstairs to make some blueberry tea when I ran across the Church of the Customer blog.  It brought back fond memories of dealing with companies who wouldn’t answer our emails or deal with us in a fair manner.  Our first “sucks” website was TrocomaniaSucks.com - Trocomania was one of those surf and earn rewards websites that were so popular 6-7 years ago, before most of them went broke after many of us figured out ways of working their program hard, and getting lots of gift certificates and freebies from them.  Trocomania had terrible customer service and tried to cheat us out of our fairly earned rewards.  So, we started TrocomaniaSucks.com.  It very very quickly got their attention, and in exchange for giving us what we’d earned, we let them have the domain.  We had the same situation with a local microscope company, who accused of us trying to cheat them, when in fact, we’d never even opened up the box of the microscope.  Long story, but this was more recently and we were better than they were at search engine optimization (we gave our site immediate backlinks from PR6 sites), so we were ranking above the company for their product.  And geepers, after that “sucks” website, they also decided to deal with us in a fair manner.  It’s always worth the price of a domain name to get your bad customer service story out there in circulation.  You have to tell your story honestly and can’t be trying to hurt the company’s reputation for no reason, but there’s no law saying that you can’t tell your story.  We did.  We got a refund and a gift certificate - we donated the gift certificate to Bat World, so they could buy the binoculars that they needed.  Everyone ended up happy (okay, everyone, in this case, means us and Bat World) and hopefully this unnamed telescope/microscope company learned to abide by their little motto of “Our Customers Come First.”  I sincerely doubt it though.