Yanked Off Yelpers: How To Piss Off Your Most Passionate Users in 7 Days or Less.

One of the many positive outcomes of Dell Hell, “Cancel My AOL account”, and “The Comcast Dude is Sleeping on My Couch” is the dramatic change these mighty-mouth insurrections have wrought in the way companies perceive — and interact with — their customers. Most companies these days are not only fervently interested in customer retention and the lifetime value of customers but they’re also laser-focused on their best customers. As a Customer Experience pro, I’ve conducted research studies on countless loyalty programs, goldmining projects, organic transparency, and ‘highly engaged’ market segmentations. I spent five years working with some of Microsoft’s evangelist programs in which we experimented with numerous ‘preferred’ or ‘insider’ strategies and nearly as many years with Yahoo Global Customer Care. Everybody (and rightfully so) is ready to jump through hoops to keep their Loyal Customers purringly happy.

Everybody that is, except Yelp.  SFGate reports that the online review site yanked ‘an undisclosed number of accounts after finding that the business owners had swapped positive reviews with other business owners. Yelp also regularly deletes reviews it believes are phony. The move sparked an outcry among local businesses, and has even led some entrepreneurs to band together with thoughts of a class-action lawsuit. Their reasoning is, if they legitimately spend their money and patronize a service, why can’t they review it?”

I’ve had an upclose-and-personal view of the mystifying way Yelp chose to treat its most passionate users via firebrand Adryenn Ashley, who in the grand tradition of “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” decided to fight back by putting her considerable marketing and citizen journalist expertise to good use. On Wednesday she created Yelp-Sucks.com and YelpLawsuit.com, asking people “yanked by Yelp” to sign up for a class-action suit. Apparently, response to these sites is growing as frustrated yelpers chase after both reinstatement — and that so-far elusive apology.

Here’s what puzzles me. Yelp is based in the Bay area. Its founders have deep Internet expertise. They understand the power of igniting a conversation and watching it grow like the wildfires down here in Big Sur. A recent article in the New York Times says: “What Yelp did differently than these others, as Jeremy Stoppelman, the site’

s co-founder and chief executive describes it, was to spend most of its energy attracting a small group of fanatic reviewers.”

Now, I have no insider information on the deleted accounts. I have no idea if any of them violated Yelp’s (fuzzy) rules. But I do know that Yelp is violating most of today’s cardinal rules of Customer Experience. Why would they choose to deal with their most passionate users, some of whom probably come from this ’small group of fanatic reviewers’ in such a harsh and old-school way? Why the cold, quasi-accusatory termination emails? Couldn’t they have at least considered possible explanations for what may appear to be phony reviews? Couldn’t they have started with contacting the questionable Yelpers and saying something like: “Hey, we’re growing like crazy because people like you love to Yelp. But we’re trying our best to keep Yelp a great tool for everyone — and some of your recent activity is raising questions. Here’s a handy contact form. Talk to us.

While Techcrunch claims that these pissed off passionate customers are merely a sign of Yelp’s power, it might be good to mull over these numbers from a recent survey: Eight out of 10 people who go away will bad mouth you. Then they’ll tell somewhere between 25 and 250 people about the problem they had — and they’ll relish explaining it in enraged detail. And woe-is-you if among these customers is a wow-is-me Adryenn Ashley . . .

After they finish bad-mouthing your company? That’s when they’ll scour the Internet in search of your competitors.