Negative word-of-mouth grows exponentially

In the pre-Internet days, it was typical to hear that every dissatisfied customer will tell at least ten people about their negative experience while every satisfied customer will tell only one person. Nowadays, the power of positive or negative word-of-mouth has risen exponentially.

Last month, my wife and I decided to purchase a high-quality 8' x 10' rug for our living room. Since neither of us have shopped for a rug before, we weren't sure where to go. We started looking carefully at advertisements in the Saturday newspaper where home furnishing retailers always seem to advertise. Since there was only one store that placed large display ads for area rugs on a regular basis, we thought that we had found the place to shop.

Like many consumers, I went to the Internet to print out a map to the store as well as check out online reviews. In Google, amongst the top five web sites that came up for the store, there was a link to a review about the store that had been posted on Epinions, one of various online sites that allows consumers to rate a product, service, store, hotel, or restaurant. On the website, a woman explained quite vividly how she had purchased a rug from the store where the salesperson had promised that she could return the rug without any hassle if she should be dissatisfied for any reason.

When the woman brought the rug home, she said it looked quite different from the one on display in the store. When she went back to the store to return the rug, the salesperson said that the rug could not be returned since it had been unrolled. She asked for a manager, and he told her the same thing. Livid, she returned home and typed her review on Epinions where she described the incident and said that she would report the store to the Better Better Business Bureau.

I went to the Better Business Bureau's easy-to-use website and found that her complaint had not only been posted but that the store had refused to resolve the issue when the Better Business Bureau informed them about the problem. This lack of resolution caused the Better Business Bureau to list the rug dealer as a business that wasn't recommeded.

What makes this story even more powerful is that the woman's charges and the Better Business Bureau report are nearly three years old. How much business do you think the rug dealer lost because it failed to address a consumer complaint in a fair and expedient fashion? They will never know, but they sure lost out on my $800 rug purchase.