Gripevine, a new way to kvetch about customer service
Gripevine is gaining traction fast--and you can guess which companies are getting the most gripes.
Attention all those who like to gripe about lousy customer service and companies (I'm looking at you AT&T and airlines everywhere) that tend to provide it: there's a new place for people to get their complaints heard, and it means business.
The site is called Gripevine, and it's more than a platform like Facebook and Twitter on which frustrated customers can broadcast their complaints and hope for a response. Gripevine is signing up companies (for a fee) and has built a dashboard that automatically informs the targeted business of the complaint, offering them a chance to solve it.
Space is no issue for the griper. There's no 140-character limit here. You can be as detailed as you wish. You can upload photos. And you can automatically share your gripe to Facebook and Twitter for maximum corporate embarrassment.
Companies can ignore Gripevine at their own peril, and some probably will.
Gripevine, which is based in Toronto, launched a month ago. So far, more than 3,000 individuals have signed up, and Gripevine has funneled about 600 gripes through its dashboard. Its founders say that they're on the verge of signing up some big corporate members.
Those aren't huge numbers, but beware: this is a company that counts as a co-founder one of the shrewdest and best-known gripers of all times.
If you don't remember the name David Carroll, you might remember his gripe. Carroll, a singer-songwriter from Halifax, Nova Scotia, achieved Internet fame and beyond in 2009, shortly after United Airlines busted his guitar while he was on tour with his band, Sons of Maxwell.
You can read the full tale here, but here are the key points. United baggage handlers in Chicago threw the band's instruments. No one at the airline cared or tried to help, even as Carroll and others saw this happening out the plane window. The guitar tossing broke Carroll's $3,500 Taylor acoustic. He went through customer service hell for months. He wrote a song, called "United Breaks Guitars," and slapped it on YouTube. (It's now approaching 12 million views).