Customer Service in the Weibo Era

Customer service in China is traditionally…well, not so great. Why? At least in part, it’s because companies don’t really have much to lose from treating customers badly. In such a giant marketplace, who cares if you had a bad experience when there are millions of other people out there to sell to? As a customer, there wasn’t much you could do. A major screw-up might be picked up by the news media, but other than that, you were pretty much stuck suffering with it.

That’s still true to an extent, but in the Weibo era, customers have a few more options. Today, for example, Shanghai Business carried a story about how CEOs on Weibo are being inundated with complaints. For example, the reporter found over 1000 recent complaints directed at Li Guoqing, CEO of Dangdang, a major e-commerce site. These weren’t complaints about the direction of the company, nor did they come from dissatisfied investors. One user wrote:

I received broken audio visual products and when I complained Dangdang told me I would have to wait a month for a replacement! It’s truly more than I can bear.

Another consumer wrote to Li:

I bought some books on Dangdang and when they arrived one was missing. Customer service has just ignored me. With customer service like this, even if you can successfully IPO, what’s the point?

Of course, being able to complain directly to the CEO of a company doesn’t make your complaint any more likely to be addressed. But since Weibo posts are never deleted and the whole thing is searchable, it does make your complaints a matter of public record. They’re searchable and visible to other potential customers.

Weibo, it seems, isn’t just an outlet for political frustrations that have nowhere else to go. It’s also increasingly an outlet for consumer frustrations, and one that companies ignore at their peril. If brands can be built on Weibo — and this is an idea many Chinese companies have embraced quite wholeheartedly — so too can they be destroyed. That doesn’t mean, of course, that your CEO has to be your new head of customer service. But if people are treating him that way — and Dangdang’s Li is far from the only CEO getting bombarded with complaints — that might be a good sign that your actual customer service team may need some adjustment.

The rules of commerce in China are changing as consumers increasingly have access to the feedback of previous customers and clients. Businesses that can’t keep up — or that insist on sticking to the old ways — may find themselves left behind by newer, more agile, and more customer friendly corporations.

That would be a good thing.