I recently had an email exchange with a company called Oz Robots – the people I bought my robot vacuum cleaner from last year. I’d made another order from them and something had gone wrong. Not only did they fix the problem immediately but they did it with courtesy and generosity and left me thinking, “Wow, what a great company!” I’ve had similar experiences with other companies over the years. The company I bought my TV from, WebPrice, is another standout. Their customer service guys moved heaven and earth to sort out a problem I was having, completely owning it, dealing with third parties and, in the end, just like Oz Robots, leaving me happier than if there’d never been a problem in the first place.
It got me thinking about customer service. Most companies can get it more-or-less right at the sales end. They’re polite, eager to please, will go that extra mile, and so on. But it’s after they’ve made the sale, after they’ve got your money, that their true colours are revealed. When you call them with a problem and they know they’re not going to make any money from this new contact, that’s when you see who you’re really dealing with. So often, the polite, eager sales guys are nowhere to be seen – they’re off somewhere spending their bonuses – and you’re left to face surly, incompetent, barely-trained customer service reps. I probably don’t need to name names but I will just mention Telstra and Vodaphone. If you’re Australian, you will almost certainly know what I mean.
I can’t imagine working as a customer service rep. If you’re doing it for a company that doesn’t really care, it must be one of the worst jobs in the universe. Every day, angry and frustrated people will be calling you, demanding you do something about the inferior product or service they’ve just bought. Every day it will be the same problems, systemic problems that no-one is bothering to fix – probably because an understaffed call-centre in the Philippines is cheaper than a product redesign or a service upgrade.
But maybe that’s not even the worst of it. The chances are that, whatever the quality of your product, there will be customers who just don’t like it because… well, because they don’t. It’s not to their taste, it doesn’t suit the way they do things, it wasn’t what they expected, and so on. And that made me realise that, as a writer, I really am in the customer service business after all.
It’s not just that I’m flogging books to people all the time (with a smile and a can-do attitude, I hope) but I’m also receiving calls from disgruntled customers – only they’re not calls, they’re written complaints, and they don’t come quietly to my desk to be dealt with, they’re posted in the most public places the complainant can find. We writers call them “negative reviews”. They’re often vitriolic and almost always anonymous. If you want to see a few, go to the page of any popular book on Amazon and scroll down.
It’s a strange form of customer complaint, unlike any you’d see in most other business areas (unless you read Yelp), and the methods for responding to them are also odd. If you write to a company to complain about its products, it’s usually because you want them to do something about it; refund your money, replace the product, improve the service. When people write negative reviews they seem to be just… well… venting. They don’t seem to want anything except to get their disappointment of their chest and, altruistically, to warn the world about your terrible product.
A good and sensible writer responds to these complaints by ignoring them. Yes, that’s right, we ignore negative reviews. It’s not because we don’t want to engage 
with customers and understand their grievances, it’s because bitter experience has shown that anything you say to an unhappy reader, no matter how humble and apologetic, will be misconstrued and, ultimately, used against you.
It’s easy to see why. To most readers, the writer is the guy with all the power. The reviewer is just the little guy, speaking truth to power. This is an attitude I feel was fostered in the days when publishers ruled the Earth. Nowadays, the chances are good that the writer self-published his or her book, is starving in a garret, and is happy that anyone noticed him or her at all, even if they said he or she was a misogynist creep whose characters were stereotypes and whose plot was as predictable as a conservative MP justifying their expenses fiddle.
So the advice is, don’t engage with negative reviewers. Either they will feel “got at” and respond with stunning vituperation, or they’ll be seen by everyone else as victims of your bullying attempts to shut down all criticism. In truth, you cannot win. The best you can achieve is to look like the US invading Iraq – and the outcome will be just as good.
So where does that leave the writer keen to service his readers and to learn from his mistakes? Frankly, you just have to lump it. Bad reviews are informative, they can teach you things about your writing and how it is perceived, but they are not going to open a fruitful and rewarding dialogue that will enable you to grow as an artist. So the only thing you can do is read them, suck it up, and move on. Customer service is for people in other professions. Your best bet is to write a blog, engage people on Twitter and Facebook, and make damned sure your next novel doesn’t suck.
