>Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible? It's a perverse result of treating customer service as a cost

>Why would a company want to encourage people to make complaints in the most public way possible? It's a perverse result of treating customer service as a cost center. The department that you call when you have a problem has targets - average call duration, cost per resolution etc. On a micro level, that seems fairly rational. They want customer service representatives to deal with complaints as quickly and cheaply as possible. On a macro level it's largely irrational, especially in the age of social media. Those CSRs are incentivised to fob off customers, who are then incentivised to complain on social media. The problem persists because of a division of responsibility - private complaints are resolved with resources from the customer support budget, but public complaints are resolved with resources from the marketing budget. For the customer service department, it's hard to argue that you should spend $200 to please a customer who is only worth $20 a year. For the marketing department, it's a no-brainer to spend $400 to prevent a social media shitstorm. Fixing that problem requires either strong leadership from the very top of the org chart, or tremendous bravery from just below the top. Someone has to make the case for the company losing fairly large sums of money in customer support expenses to prevent the risk of people badmouthing them on Twitter. Loss aversion cuts both ways - you don't want to spend the money to prevent a hypothetical, but you'll spend the money in a heartbeat to fix a bad news story.