Missing in the equation is the most obvious solution: Listen to your customers. The first time. The call center is usually the first place to hear these customer service complaints -- when it isn't the source of them. A common thread in these angry customer blogs is a company that refused to hear a customer over and over again.

While it makes sense to read about what customers think of your company, why wait to hear the bad stuff? Focus on service.

There's a New York company called Nielsen BuzzMetrics that monitors the blogosphere for chatter about its Fortune 1000 customers. The company's marketing vice-president, Max Kalehoff points out that the Internet can provide "early insights" about consumer trends and prejudices. But it isn't easy for big firms to start engaging their customers:

"Most Fortune 1000 companies are not of the cultural mindset where they talk directly to their customers," Mr Kalehoff adds. "They've built so many walls and silos that they've lost that direct communication."

Too true. I can't resist a personal anecdote here. After a bad experience with my local cable company -- my cable Internet installation never got off the ground -- I resorted to DSL. Why? mostly because the cable company ignored me. My calls were transfered too many times, I was asked to repeat personal information too many times, my installer wasn't prepared by his dispatcher, and no one followed up with me to reschedule the failed installation. No one asked me why I didn't reschedule myself. And now I'm writing about it on the Internet.

No, I'm not angry enough to name names, or to set up a website dedicated to slamming and exposing my nemesis, but there are those who do. Like Jeremy Cooperstock's cleverly named Untied, a screed started in 1996 after Cooperstock's bad United Airlines flight from Toronto to Tokyo. A sympathetic letter in reply to Mr. Cooperstock's original complaint would have prevented the creation of the extensive anti-United website. As Cooperstock says, "it was not the poor treatment we received from United, but rather, the subsequent disregard for a serious, polite complaint, which led to the creation of the web pages."

Jeremy Cooperstock is the perfect example of what Call Center Magazine editor Keith Dawson calls "the super-empowered angry customer" (scroll down in his ACCE preview / State of the Call Center Industry article). Cooperstock is one guy with one bad experience that was exacerbated at every turn.

The Guardian lists other consumer sites, too:

• Walmart Watch says it was started in the Spring of 2005 to "challenge the world’s largest retailer to become a better employer, neighbor, and corporate citizen." It's dedicated to any and all news about Walmart, most of it bad.
  
• McChronicles covers McDonald's, and actually, the coverage, when unfavorable, is from the point of view of a disappointed fan: "We aim to "chronicle the McDonald's experience from the consumers' point of view". We are not a shil for McDonald's, nor are we a self-appointed policing service, nor a hate site. We aim to be honest, fair, and professional at all times." McChronicles links to some McDonald's corporate blogs, celebrates "The Most Illest, Futuristic Sandwich Ever" and "THE BEST McDonald's I've Ever Been In" (store #5365 in Cortland, NY), and exposes stores that need sprucing up.
  
• Think Secret publishes rumors about Apple's future products, and is in the midst of a lawsuit because of it. Think Secret creator Nick dePlume reports that Apple is working on a touch-screen ipod and a mobile phone.