Recently, a customer’s complaint to Urban Clap, a startup that connects various service providers and professionals to customers, came in the form of a long poem which has since gone viral.

The customer had forked out ₹1,500 for his air-conditioner to be repaired, despite which it reverted to its non-working state.

Among the many lines Somak Ghosh wrote were:

“… in grief I was sinking,

as I watched my AC’s dying lights blinking

…

UrbanClap, you depraved, unkind start-up

The least of all, I expected you to f*** up”

And Urban Clap replied:

“… We feel your pain as our own,

And regret this seed of contempt that has been sown.

…

It's our job to get this fixed

If the professional isn't one, we shall have him nixed.”

It’s unusual for customers and companies to wax poetic in complaints and redress of poor service but some have done it, injecting verse with a sense of humour and admission of guilt, to take the edge off the matter.

Suhail Vadgaokar, Vice-President, Customer Experience, told cat.a.lyst Urban Clap first called Ghosh and told him they’d resolve the problem.

But “the customer had reached out in a creative manner into which he had put a lot of effort, so we wanted to respond in a similar way. One of our content writers came up with this poetic response, it led to a conversation with others putting in their poetic bit, and it went viral,” he says.

Last year, Wes Metcalfe of South Yorkshire, UK, bought a cucumber from Tesco to make sandwiches. Along with the vegetable came a longish, dead worm, which Metcalfe named William, and wrote to the retailer demanding an explanation, and told it about the funeral he’d planned for William. To which Tesco said, as part of a bigger poetic tribute:

“Let us gather, light a candle to burn, and celebrate the life of William the worm … William will be back, very much like Arnie, though now we will all check before we make a sarnie!”

This conversation, embellished with more poetry, too went viral. The BBC reports that Tesco gave Metcalfe a voucher for £10 to cover the funeral costs. It added that Metcalfe was happy with the resolution.

Vadgaokar says Urban Clap works on the principle that the customer is always right and apologises immediately. “Clearly, we’d messed up with that customer.”

He does say, though, that encouraging complaints on social media is not the best thing to do.

“We always try and take it offline. It’s not a question of image, but there are traditional ways of handling a complaint, call or email.”

But would companies hear customers otherwise?

“Bigger brands often take time to respond to complaints, they have millions of customers, but for a small brand like ours, it’s important to respond and let them know we’re listening.”

No doubt Urban Clap and Tesco earned much goodwill with their approach to the complaints. Vikas Chawla, co-Founder of digital marketing agency Social Beat, says consumers will continue to complain on social media and brands have to “accept it and be transparent”. In the Urban Clap case, it helped that the customer was not being rude, so the startup too took a lighter approach.

In his experience, bigger brands are not yet ready for transparency – either approvals take time or the senior management is against getting into a conversation with the customer. “We start showing them data on how it’s hurting the brand and then they start understanding that it has repercussions.” Industries where online activity such as research and transactions brings in a lot of the business – e-commerce, four-wheelers, hospitality and retail – are more sensitive to social media feedback. Manufacturing and FMCG industries, not so much.

Chawla notes that ignoring the complaint does not help. Social media complaints, including those on blogs and review sites, live on, “the remains of it are always there”, surfacing every now and then on the Internet.

Vadgaokar says 99 per cent of customers who complain have a genuine problem. “Social media gives us feedback, and the brand’s attitude to complaints matters.” If the customer has a history of being abusive or misbehaving, he is blacklisted, he adds.

While a perusing of various sources on the Internet reveals many humorous exchanges between customer service reps and customers, here’s one more example of Tesco’s poetic resolutions, in response to two students who expressed their disappointment – in a sonnet – over its decision to stop stocking their favourite popcorn at a Tesco store in Fife:

However dear ladies, please dry your tears,

We’ll still sell your popcorn for many more years,

The only thing is that you may need to travel,

To find your true love for this tale to unravel.”

Some reports say Tesco even sent them a gift card worth £10 with the letter that carried this poem.

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