Some customers have legitimate complaints. Others are just itching for a fight--or a refund. How to respond.

For many small businesses, a solid online reputation provides a gateway for virtual word-of-mouth referrals. Unfortunately, a negative review--especially one that is articulate and engaging--on Yelp!, TripAdvisor or Amazon, can have an outsized impact on a small company.

I found one of the best public responses to an irate customer complaint from Savusavu, Fiji. The respondent was Tige Young, CEO and owner of the Tui Tai Expeditions, cited by National Geographic as "one of the best adventure travel companies on earth."

With an excellent online reputation, it would be understandable if Tige chose to disregard the occasional negative review. However, rather than ignore discontented customers, Tige does a masterful job of crafting rebuttals that are informative, appropriately deferential and amusing.

Bipolar reviewers

The reality of customer reviews is that, in most cases, the people who take the time to share their thoughts online either had a euphoric experience or were extremely dissatisfied. Thus, online customer reviews tend to be either highly positive or grossly negative. This is certainly true for Tui Tai Expeditions. Of its 51 reviews on TripAdvisor, 40 are extremely positive, giving the company five stars. Only three customers voice negative opinions.

I was particularly impressed with Tige's response to this irate customer's review, posted on TripAdvisor under the heading "Very Disappointing." In it, the customer complains about, among other things, the food and the variety of activities available on the trip. Tige politely addresses the customer's concerns, while firmly supporting the veracity of his company's value proposition. Here's how he does it.

Tip #1: Authentic, not corporate.

When you read Tige's comments, you can picture him having a calm, polite conversation with the "very disappointed" honeymooners who wrote the negative review. His reply is not perfect, but neither are real people's conversations.

Start-ups should similarly communicate in an intimate and friendly tone, and avoid the off-putting formality of a corporate spokesperson. Of course, the relative degree of formality should be consistent with your company's marketing voice. However, when dealing with angry customers, overt formality can be misinterpreted as bureaucratic insensitivity.

Tip #2: Pander, don't preach

When addressing complaints via social media, your intended audience is not the person who feels they were wronged. Rather, you should indirectly speak to the potential future customers who will consider the negative review, and your response, when assessing the purchase of your start-up's product or service.

Tip #3: Counter, don't call out

When a customer says something untrue about your business, it is more effective to show an inconsistency between his or her complaint and his or her action,s rather than calling out the customer as a liar. In Tige's case, he notes that the disappointed honeymooners were offered "the choice to disembark and move to any number of nearby resorts, OR to stay onboard for 2 additional days. The reviewer chose to stay onboard for 2 additional days. That did not strike us as an indication of dissatisfaction."

Tip #4: Deferential, not defensive

No matter how rude or unsavory the negative comments, always treat your customers (even pissed-off former customers) with deference and respect. Even when there is little chance of winning back their business, keep in mind that your conversation is being held in the public square and will be accessible online for many years to come.

Tip #5: Break it down. Never rant.

Tige addresses each aspect of the customer's complaint in a compartmentalized manner, just as a skilled lawyer refutes a hostile witness' adverse testimony. Rather than force the reader to dig through a dense rebuttal, he clearly outlines his counterarguments by using headings to denote his response to each topic raised by the dissatisfied customers.

Tip #6: Humorous, not humoring

Realizing that his primary audience is his future customers, Tige uses humor to undercut some of the more ludicrous aspects of the reviewer's diatribe. For instance, when responding to a complaint about the weather, Tige notes, "That trip was indeed affected by heavy rain. Still, passengers were able to complete nearly every activity scheduled. Better weather certainly makes it a better experience, and try though we may, we haven't found a way to control the weather : )." Yes, Tige included a smiley face in his response.

Tip #7: Take ownership, not umbrage

Although Tige cannot control the weather, he willingly claims ownership of the aspects of the honeymooners' trip that he could influence, writing, "As an owner, Service is one of those areas we can control (unlike the weather), and it's the area I care about most." He then defends the quality of the service provided by stating the results of a contemporaneous survey, taken on board at the end of the voyage.

Tip#8: Facts, not flatulation

Whenever possible, counter a negative reviewer's comments with concrete facts. In Tige's case, he shares the collective numerical scores of the passengers who accompanied the honeymooners on their disappointing voyage. For instance, the honeymooners noted that the food did not meet their expectations, yet Tige notes that the cuisine was given a "9 out of 10″ by all of the passengers, including the disenchanted honeymooners.

Channeling Tige

The next time a disgruntled customer writes a negative online comment about your start-up, resist the natural temptation to write a hurried, angry reply. Instead, pour yourself a large glass of pineapple juice (rum optional) and take a deep breath of an imaginary tropical breeze. If you then pretend you are sitting on the Tui Tai, calmly chatting with the disappointed customer, while surrounded by a multitude of your future customers, you will no doubt craft responses that are as effective and engaging as Mr. Tige Young's.

by David Hoffman

By Julian Dautremont-Smith
Chief Sustainability Officer
Alfred State College

In part 1 of this post, I examined current practices for identifying sustainability courses and found that definitions of sustainability-focused and -related courses tend to leave too much room for interpretation. As a result, institutions are taking widely varying approaches to course classification and there is a huge range in scores earned on the two credits in STARS that focus on courses (ER Credits 6 and 7). Based on these findings, I argued that more guidance in STARS was necessary. In this post, I’ll make some suggestions for what this guidance should look like.

Given the wide spread of scores earned on ER 6 and 7, the first issue such guidance must address is how wide we should cast our net when classifying sustainability courses. At first blush, a more inclusive approach seems to make sense. Virtually all disciplines have an important role to play in sustainability and it seems appropriate to recognize the contributions that courses are making. Indeed, using a broad definition may enable better engagement with faculty who may not have realized that they were teaching a “sustainability” course.

The problem is that it is too easy to stretch the broader definitions to include virtually all courses. For example, some institutions classified many of their medical and nursing courses as sustainability-related, perhaps on the not-unreasonable basis that human health is an element of sustainability. However, similar logic could be used to count all economics and perhaps even most business courses as sustainability-related on the basis that they address the economic dimension of sustainability. Likewise, the logic would seem to support counting any course that addresses social well-being in one way or another, including sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, psychology, etc. To the extent that the arts contribute to human well-being, theater, music, fine arts, and even art history courses could conceivably be counted. Language courses could count because they facilitate communication across cultures, which is a prerequisite for effective global resource management. Even physical education courses could count since they contribute to human health.

Unfortunately, classifying every course as a sustainability course isn’t useful. It doesn’t provide an incentive for additional integration of sustainability concepts into the curriculum and it doesn't enable meaningful benchmarking over time or in comparison to peers. So how do we create definitions that recognize the potential contribution of all disciplines but still result in useful and comparable data?

Defining “sustainability-focused” in a way that generates more comparable data seems fairly straightforward. The key in my opinion is to make more clear that the course must explicitly focus on sustainability as an integrated concept. That means courses which emphasize just a part of sustainability do not count and neither do traditional courses that include some sustainability content. Providing some examples of courses that likely would and would not count will also help to make this clear. Here’s what I recommend:

A sustainability focused course is one in which the primary focus is sustainability as an integrated concept, including its social, economic, and environmental dimensions. This focus must be explicit. Typically, this will be achieved by including “sustainability” or “sustainable” in the course title. At a minimum, sustainability must appear prominently in the course description. As sustainability is an interdisciplinary topic, such courses generally incorporate insights from multiple disciplines. These courses are also likely to have been created recently since sustainability is a relatively new field of study.

Courses that would likely count:

• Introduction to Sustainability
• Sustainable Agriculture
• Architecture for Sustainability
• Sustainable Business
• Sustainability Science

Courses that could count if their primary focus is explicitly sustainability:

• Introduction to Environmental Studies
• Literature and Nature
• Ecological Economics
• Systems Thinking and Analysis
• International Development
• Environmental Ethics
• Global Environmental Health
• Society and the Environment
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Urban Planning
• Environmental Technology
• Environmental Law and Policy
• Life Cycle Assessment
• Environmental History
• Resilient Societies

Courses that would likely not count:

• Cultural Anthropology
• Organic Chemistry
• Microeconomics
• Transportation Planning
• Geographic Information Systems
• Civil Engineering
• Marine Biology
• Epidemiology
• Introduction to Gender Studies
• Transcendentalist Literature
• Nursing 1
• Oncology

Redefining “sustainability-related” more precisely seems much more challenging. The nomenclature itself seems problematic. Virtually all courses are related to sustainability in some way. Even courses that likely undermine sustainability (e.g. courses on marketing luxury goods or coal mining) are related to sustainability and yet I don’t think we ought to be awarding points for such courses through STARS.

Given this, I think it might be best to retire the “sustainability-related” label and develop new labels that better reflect the different ways courses can advance sustainability. In addition to courses that are focused on sustainability, I can think of two other major categories of courses that we should seek to recognize and encourage through STARS: courses that are inclusive of sustainability and courses that are supportive of sustainability. I define these terms as follows:

A course that is inclusive of sustainability is one that is primarily focused on a topic other than sustainability but includes at least one unit or module on sustainability as an integrated concept, including its social, economic, and environmental dimensions. The word “sustainability” is likely to appear somewhere in the syllabus of such courses.

Courses that would likely count:

• an Introduction to Chemistry course that includes a module on green chemistry and chemistry’s contribution to sustainability
• an Art and Social Change course that examines art’s contribution to sustainability
• a Math in Society course in which practice problems are oriented around sustainability
• a Business in the European Union course with a unit on sustainability
• an Ethics courses that discusses inter-generational equity and the sustainability ethic

A course that is supportive of sustainability includes at least one unit or module that provides skills or knowledge directly connected to solving one or more major sustainability challenges, including: climate change and ocean acidification; poverty and global inequalities; depletion of nonrenewable resources; barriers to cooperation posed by prejudice and intolerance; over-harvesting of renewable resources (e.g. fisheries, soils, and forests); habitat destruction and loss of biodiversity; undemocratic institutions and violations of human rights, over fertilization of water bodies; desertification and water scarcity; violence and war; and toxics in the environment. Such courses do not necessarily cover “sustainability” as a concept but should address more than one of the three dimensions of sustainability (i.e. social well being, economic prosperity, and environmental health).

Courses that would likely count:

• Photovoltaic and Wind Turbine Installation
• a Construction Management course in which students help construct a green building
• Conservation Biology
• Environmental Journalism
• Peace Studies
• Development Studies
• Natural Resource Management
• Organic Agriculture
• Neglected Diseases
• an Urban Planning course in which students develop plans for sustainable redevelopment of a city park
• Bioremediation
• Climate Adaptation
• Integrated Pest Management
• National Environmental Policy Act
• an HVAC course that includes a unit on high-efficiency and geothermal systems
• Life Cycle Assessment
• Geo-engineering
• Cause Marketing
• Green Chemistry
• Environmental Design

Admittedly, these definitions (especially the one for courses that are supportive of sustainability) still leave more room for interpretation than might seem ideal for comparability purposes, but I’m not sure how much additional specificity is possible. I couldn’t figure out how to be more specific without excluding courses that I think we really do want to be able to recognize and encourage through STARS. Given the diversity of courses offered by STARS participants, allowing some room for interpretation seems inevitable and probably desirable. My hope is that these proposed definitions would significantly reduce, if not eliminate, variability in how institutions are classifying and reporting on sustainability courses.

If AASHE were to incorporate these new definitions into STARS, I’d recommend counting all three types of sustainability courses equally. It's not obvious that one type of course inherently contributes more to sustainability than another. Valuing the courses equally also reflects the reality that the differences in content between a course that is focused on sustainability and a course that is supportive of sustainability may be quite small in some cases. This approach is likely to lead to more accurate categorization since participants would not be tempted to classify each course in the most lucrative category possible.

I'm keenly aware that diagnosing the problem is much easier than proposing a workable solution so I’d love comments on these proposed definitions. Constructive suggestions are especially welcome! Are they clear? Too open-ended or too narrow? What would make them better?

New
York City Bus Trip

(seb)
Saturday, March 2, 2013
Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 8:00am
All Guests = $30
Ticket #: 40 of 103

PSA Norouz

Persian Student Association
Saturday, March 2, 2013
UC Ballroom
Doors open @ 7:30pm
UMBC ID = FREE
Ticket #: 59 of 350

OZ Midnight Premiere

(seb)
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 11:00pm
All Guests = $5
Ticket #: 5 of 260

Medieval Times Bus Trip

(seb)
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Bus departs The Commons Circle @ 6:00pm
All Guests = $35
Ticket #: 8 of 49

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Concert

(seb)
Sunday, April 21, 2013
8pm
Retriever Activity Center
All Guests = $15
Online Tickets = $20 (seb.umbc.edu/quadmania)
Ticket #: 1159 of 2500

An updated Working Draft of Website Accessibility Conformance Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) 1.0 was published today by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (WCAG WG) and Evaluation and Repair Tools Working Group (ERT WG), through the joint WCAG 2.0 Evaluation Methodology Task Force (Eval TF). WCAG-EM describes an approach for evaluating how websites, including web applications and websites for mobile devices, conform to WCAG 2.0. Learn more from the WCAG-EM Overview and about the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

The HTML Working Group has published two First Public Working Drafts today. Both documents were developed in collaboration with the Responsive Images Community Group.

• The picture element. The picture element is an image container whose source content is determined by one or more CSS media queries.
• Use Cases and Requirements for Standardizing Responsive Images. This document captures the use cases and requirements for standardizing a solution for responsive images. The use cases and requirements were gathered with consultation with HTML Working Group and WHATWG participants, RICG group members, and the general public.

Learn more about the HTML Activity and about W3C Community Groups.