eCustomer complaints: a complaint!

Handling customer complaints is an important part of any business. The way the complaint is handled can mean the difference between huge profits and losses due to satisfaction or dissatisfaction in the company. Not too long ago, as I recall, customer complaints to me usually meant my parents marching up to the store manager with a product in hand telling them how dissatisfied they were.  I was a kid then and whether or not my parents got the desired response they wanted was often a mystery to me, but one thing was for certain, the response was prompt and immediate.

As technology improved, my parents could now send e-mails directly to department heads. I would imagine these people spent a couple minutes each day reading through complain mails and replying them, because my parents typically received replies.

Now that I'm older, I too have taken the role of dissatisfied customer. Spending my own hard earned money on things I want and need only to realise sometimes they fail to live my to their promises. But somehow I feel that reporting has become somewhat inefficient.

Lets take for example social media. Kaplan and Haenlein  (2010) proposed six different types of social media: collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs (twitter), content communities (soccernet), social networking sites (facebook), virtual game worlds (world of warcraft) and virtual social worlds (second life).

Sharing of user generated content is meant to be what is constant in these six different types of social media, but that is not the only thing that is constant. Harassment, bullying, hacking are problems that too are constant within all six social medias. To try and rectify this, social medias have a "Report" button for customers to lodge a complain. But in my opinion, many people still end up being very dissatisfied with the way these social medias respond to customer complains. This is a link to Facebook's report page, as you can see, there is a butt load of people complaining about the way Facebook has handled reports. A quick read would reveal that sometimes Facebook has not responded fast enough (some waiting 4 months?!) and others reveal that Facebook has removed innocent photos (is what the victim claims anyway).

I personally, often read football forums. And honestly it infuriates me that people spam in multiple posts, identical comments, derogatory comments and even false advertising. Reporting doesn't seem to serve any purpose because it takes a long while for the sites to respond, and even if they ban the user, the troll would simply just create another username!

Do you guys experience this as well? What would be a way for companies with massive online presence do to curb this problem? Leave me a comment! Thanks!