We are becoming pretty familiar with bloggers every now and then ripping into businesses that are providing poor customer service and poor customer experience.

I’m talking here about someone that writes a less than complimentary blog post on a product or service; I am not talking about conversations and threads on an online forum, etc.

Most businesses will have little experience about how to engage properly with negative commentary from bloggers, who by definition will be pretty savvy communicators.

The jump from email, phone and forum dialogue through to discussion on the bloggers site - an away fixture if you will - is a lonely place to be slugging it out in defence of a product or service.

The thing that’s missing for me though in these encounters is the success rate or closure rate for the blogger vs. how it could have been achieved through “traditional” avenues?

Does the public dialogue and exposure help solve the problem?

Does the service provider often just dig their heels in and say “feck you” to the negative criticism of the blogger - thinking that it will go away.

The latter is the worst case scenario for the blogger - probably more than made up for by increased traffic and just a little more profile.

The worst case scenario for the service provider is in how their brand name will probably now be submerged in negativity in their first page of SERP’s.

From that perspective alone, they should be swallowing their pride, desisting from cease and desist and such foolishness, and attempt to make the customer happy - regardless of the feelings of indignation, anger and loathing that they feel.