A blog called CRM Lowdown recently compiled industry data and various opinions from the blogosphere – including a column I wrote on Home Depot – for a post titled “The 10 Best (and 10 Worst) Companies for Customer Service.” The article has been generating thousands of page views, links and comments from people agreeing and disagreeing with the rankings.
The companies on the “worst” list can’t be happy. It’s one of those classic bad PR things to be recognized for treating customers like cattle droppings, especially by some trade blog whose list starts showing up on all the search engines.
But CRM Lowdown’s best-and-worst list isn’t really a legitimate industry ranking. It wasn’t compiled after detailed analysis by customer service experts or consumer advocates. There’s no information on the article’s author. The blog itself doesn’t even list its editorial and research staff.
That’s because there isn’t any. Not in the traditional sense, anyway.
CRM Lowdown is part of a young business-niche blog network called BizNicheMeda, which makes money from Google-generated advertising that appear on their sites. This is a low-margin business, and most blog networks go under trying produce enough new content to drive traffic. But the people working to make BizNicheMedia profitable think they’ve figured out the economics. First they create blogs focusing only on narrow but profitable business sectors.
Then they outsource their content to India and other “developing countries at a significantly lower cost than what American, Australian or UK writers would cost.”
So what’s the methodology behind CRM Lowdown’s best-and-worst list? It doesn't matter. As BizNicheMedia’s founder wrote earlier this year, the bottom line is to “prioritize content volume over quality (while still trying to maintain a reasonable standard of quality).” Whether or not the companies fingered for having the nation’s worst customer service actually deserve the label... well, that’s reasonably relative.
But as commercial blog hit lists like these gain volume in the reverberating echoes of the Internet, that doesn’t make them less of a PR issue.
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