275 : From Pissed to Empowered: How Consumer Feedback Drives Business Transformation

Speaker A: Welcome to Navigating the Customer Experience. Want to improve your organization's customer service? Looking for insider tips to knock your customer socks off? Then you're in the right place. Here's your host, Yanique Grant.

Speaker B: Welcome to Navigating the Customer Experience. On today's episode, our guest is Michael Podolsky. Michael is a co founder and CEO of pissedconsumer.com a leading customer advocacy and resolution platform, and wisebrand.com, an AI strategy and product engineering agency. After a frustrating personal experience as a customer, he built a platform designed to give consumers a voice and help businesses learn from real feedback. Over the past 20 years, Michael has grown the pissed consumer.com into a platform serving over 30 million users, starting with just a $200 investment and no venture backing. His unique perspective on customer experience and advocacy is that customer experiences offer, uh, powerful insights, revealing opportunities to refine business strategies and build lasting trust. He inspires business owners to improve their online reputation, customer service, customer relations, and brand awareness by taking negative feedback. See Seriously. So, without further delay, sit back, plug your earphones in, and let's jump right into this conversation with Michael. Welcome, Michael.

Speaker A: Thank you. Unique. Thank you for having me on this podcast. Really excited, ready to go.

Speaker B: Awesome. All right, now, we always like to start off the podcast, giving our guests an opportunity to share in their own words a little bit about their journey. How you got from where you were to where you are today. So I think a good space to start based on your bio is maybe that personal experience that clearly was the catalyst that brought you to where you are today.

Speaker A: Thank you. Thank you for asking this interesting question. Um, so, yes, I get quite a stare from people that I meet for the first time when I tell them that I run a website called Pissed Consumer. And I follow that by typically saying, hey, I got pissed once. Today, 200,000 businesses are pissed at me for starting this as a business. Because on our platform, we help millions of consumers deal with hundreds of thousands of businesses share. We let consumers share their opinions, uh, about businesses. But my goal here is not tarnish, uh, businesses reputation. My goal here is for businesses to learn from their own experiences and also from experiences of their competitors. Um, sometimes I say, why learn from your own mistakes when you can learn from mistakes of your competitors? And you can read about those mistakes using the words of consumers who are writing reviews on Best Consumer. That's my journey. That's Best Consumer dot com. That's how I came about it. Uh, if you're specifically asking about the experience, it was a bad Vacation where I was sent to a really bad vacation spot once. And as a consumer, I had no recourse of doing something about it. Yes, I complained to travel agent. It was before the Internet age. I complained to wholesaler, travel wholesaler. I complained to, I even submitted the claim to credit card. I filed a small claims court. And everywhere I turned to, I always got denied in my request to get satisfaction over this particular hotel. Because people, the organizations will tell me, hey, you stayed there entire week, but no one thought, uh, about was at the time before the Internet and we would buy a package, fly in, hotel, fly out at the end of the week. So I had no easy way of getting out from that bad experience. I was pretty much stuck there for entire week. And therefore I wasn't able to get a refund or anything from that particular experience. That's how this consumer got born.

Speaker B: I love it. Piss consumer. So, you know, it's funny that you started an organization focused on receiving negative feedback and taking it seriously. What has your experience been, um, since you have started this organization. Do you believe that organizations that you represent or transcribe those negative feedbacks on your website are actually using that information to enhance the quality of the customer experiences? Are they taking the negative feedback more seriously as a result of having platforms like yours available where customers can be taken seriously?

Speaker A: Thank you for the challenging question. It is a challenging question. There are a lot of platforms out there that are review platforms. This consumer is transforming. Um, yes, you can compare us to a lot of different review platforms, but we really want to believe that we are, uh, different and special in the way we do things. And I'll try to explain how we are special. So there are a lot of platforms out there where consumers can go and share their concerns. Now, in terms of negative reviews, best consumer is the largest. We are the largest platform is a negative name as part of the name of the platform, if you know what I say. But there are other platforms where consumers could leave reviews. With that realization, we started something new. In the past three months. We now offer our consumers ability to create collective complaints. What it means is a consumer can leave a feedback about a particular company and then a consumer and also best consumer. We work together to collect signatures under, um, a particular complaint that reinforces the message that we deliver to companies. And we are starting to get subtraction with companies actually reacting to collective complaints, uh, better than they would react, uh, to individual complaints. So we see some companies that otherwise would not react, uh, to a single complaint. They are reacting much more favorably let's say in quotes favorably, but they are responding to collective complaint, where to individual complaint that they would remain silent. Again, there are a lot of, let's look at it honestly. There are a lot of companies that fail to respond to every single complaint. When I speak to companies, they would say, hey, there are a lot of platforms that leave a review. We do not have a budget to go across all the platforms to respond to every single review. On one hand I do understand those business owners. On the other hand, it is a consumer's choice, I will repeat, it is a consumer's choice where consumer chooses to leave their feedback to the about the company. And one more important, um, item I would like to add is 87%. Just listen to this number. 87% of consumers would contact a company before leaving negative feedback online. So consumer would always attempt to resolve the issue directly with the company before leaving negative feedback on the platform such as ours.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Yet the same time companies sometimes choose not to respond to consumer on every single platform. But it is a consumer's choice, thankfully, to choose on which platform to leave a review. But going back to your question, collective complaint is a new and uh, it's a unique feature for best consumer that we have started to uh, offer our consumers and we get good results for it. So if consumers hear this podcast, I would love for them to continue using our collective complaint feature.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Brilliant. All right, um, kind of going back to what you just mentioned, about 87% of consumers will actually reach out to the organization to try and resolve it before they go ahead and leave a, uh, complaint. I agree with you because I have found that the reason why people are complaining in the first place is they want to continue doing business with you. That's why they're even complaining. Because if they never had any intention of continuing to do business with you now or in the future, they wouldn't bother to complain and they would just leave. And if you're not tracking that attrition over time, you'd have lost a good portion of your customer base. So I completely agree that complaints are very important and businesses that don't pay attention to the complaints are leaving a good portion of their wallet opportunities on the table. Yeah, because those are opportunities that they could have fixed and those customers could now become their loyal customers for life if it is resolved in a, you know, a positive way.

Speaker A: So yes, we treat these complaints as small gifts that consumers are giving to companies in order to, um, improve the service of the company. A consumer. You, I 100 agree with you. We are on the same page. Consumers want to continue to do business with the company. Uh, and they want companies to improve. There is another piece of statistics that we've had is I believe it is 72% of consumers who leave negative feedback want their followers not to experience the same fate. So they either want other consumers not to go there or they want companies to change so that other consumers do not fall into the same situation. So it is a feedback that consumer is leaving is so that the followers next customers do not have same negative experience. We kind of want to forewarn others be white knights in saving other people not to step the same type of problems. So 100° with you. Unique.

Speaker B: Brilliant. Brilliant. All right. Now Michael, uh, I would also like to ask you, since you've been doing this for quite some time, I would believe that you have some experience in maybe giving organizations a recommendation as to how they can manage complaints. So yes, there are these many different platforms that complaints can be collected on whether on an individual basis or a collective basis. But what would you say is a good way that they can categorize the severity of a complaint and then based on the severity of the complaint, what's your recommendation on the timeline for resolution? Because I personally believe that if you do have an issue and you complain about it, if it takes too long to be resolved, then the customer uh, gets even more frustrated. You know probably that's when they end up going to social media and doing a live video and you know, maybe even calling their main news news reporters in their city or wherever to talk about the frustration that they're experiencing. But that's when you know the kettle is, the bottle is like really overflowing now and they're at ah their limit and they can't take anymore when they'll take those ext measures. But do you give your organizations or companies that you will receive these complaints for recommendations or guidelines? Because sometimes they don't know and they don't necessarily have an expert in house that can be guiding them um, in the, in the right way.

Speaker A: You freezing this question quite well I would add also. So who is the benef? So depending on the size of the organization.

Speaker B: Uh-huh.

Speaker A: If it is a smaller organization or medium sized organization where we get to speak to sea level managers, those folks understand the value of the brand, the value of a good service quite well. But when you start talking to a larger organization, handling customer complaints online is typically job of customer service organization.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And that is a problem because you are asking a department majority of the reviews ah are complaining about is asked to handle those issues. Now it's also important to understand the negative feedback that consumers leave or negative feelings that consumers have is not often about the customer service itself. It's about other parts of the organization. It could be about logistics, it could be about production, it could be about operations, it could be variety of other things. But we always speak through customer service. And when customer service is also tasked to deal with reviews, it's not fair. It's not fair to customer service and quite often it's not to the best interest of customer service to do a good job there. A good organization would have great transparency between customer service and all other departments where customer service has clear and easy way to escalate issue and actually fix the situation. Do you know that when I go to customer, uh, it's just a step aside. Do you know that customer service are treated by management of companies as a deflection mechanism? Just think about it. You are as a customer are looked at as an object of deflection. You need to be deflected as a consumer from talking to the company. It's scary. And I always, when I go to customer service conferences, I always make it a point. Stop talking about consumers as objects of deflection. What are you doing? We are not to be deflected. You need to listen to us. We want to communicate something important to you. So a successful organization would listen to consumers. Customer service agents that receive input from customers, step back. If 87% of consumers talk to customer service, if customer service is empowered, has an ability to change the situation, you will not have a lot of negative reviews. So empower your customer service. Give your customer service ability to respond and fix the situation. Then there is going to be no negative review.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Just think about it. That's the flow, the way it should be. And customer service shall be 100% empowered to resolve the issue or to advise other departments on how to fix it so that future customers do not end up in the same situation. That's what's important.

Speaker B: All right. Okay. Michael. We always like to ask our guests what's the one online resource, tool, website or application that you absolutely cannot live without in your own business? Do you have one of those

Speaker A: today? It's artificial intelligence with all of its tools that comes together and you can have an AI agent that helps you in myriads of different ways. And me and my companies, number of companies, we are um, all in favor of agentic AI research. We are capable of doing a lot of deep research into Companies inside of pest consumer. And we are able to get very unique data perspectives based on the AI analysis that we do.

Speaker B: All right, is there a specific AI that you like using? Like Perplexity, Claude, ChatGPT, or you use a uh, combination of all that exist?

Speaker A: You have another hour to have a discussion on that topic. Okay. I call it we have a zoo. We have uh, an open claw running in one organization with 12 agent. We have, ah, another open claw running in another organization with eight agent. And there are some agents that use open AI brains. There are other agents that use Claude, uh, brains. There are other agents that exist in Hermes, um, or cloth code environments. So we have quite a zoo looking at a lot of data and PIST Consumer has a lot of data that we, uh, go through. We use open a. Uh, we use our agents for recruitment, hiring, for operations, for marketing, M for deep research of data, data for analyzing voice of consumer. We do a lot of things with a. It's very good. If you want to discover a totally different world for you, no problem.

Speaker B: All right, so, um, it's fair to say Michael uses a combination of all of the different, um, AI tools that exist out there based on the scope of his business. And so that's really awesome. Our next question for you is, could you share with us maybe one or two books that you've read? It could have been a book that you read a very long time ago or even one that you've read recently, but it has had a positive impact on you, whether personally or professionally.

Speaker A: Getting Past no is the name of the book that I read more than 40 years ago. It is a book about conflicts and negotiations. It is a book how to convince other people to do things that are important to you. So the name of the book is Getting us Now. It's a small book, but I would highly recommend it to anyone who deals with people face to face.

Speaker B: All right, perfect. Thank you so much for sharing. All right, now can you also share with our listeners, Michael, what's the one thing that's going on in your life right now that you're really excited about? Either something you're working on to develop yourself or your people?

Speaker A: I am m extremely lucky. I have people that have been with me for years. Um, average tenure in my organization is about seven years for the average. For technology companies, it's unheard of. It's a very long time for people to stay in the business. And, um, those people possess, uh, large amounts of institutional knowledge. With AI coming fast onto us. I do realize the importance of institutional Knowledge and I need to combine AI and my institutional knowledge of the long term employees. So the path that I have chosen is to teach every single employee in my company AI, deep AI, agentic AI. I make sure that people in all of my organizations have time and resources to learn and practically use AI, uh, across their departments, uh, in order to enhance overall productivity of the company. The way I'm looking at it, and I was quite public about it with, uh, my employees when I said in nine months I will either need 70% less people or my company will need to be 10 times more productive. And I believe we all have chosen, all meaning management and employees have chosen to be 10 times more productive based on the results that I see from my own employees and the um, effort that's being placed into AI, agentic AI and what people are doing in building, rebuilding processes and managing AI. One more important thing that I want to leave you with is this. We are the last generation of people that managed only human teams.

Speaker B: I never thought of it that way. That's really.

Speaker A: We need to, we need to retool the, our organizations to be AI and human mixed and how it's done. And I think we are doing quite great with it and I am very, very excited about it and to create a proper mix.

Speaker B: Perfect. Thank you for sharing, Michael. Now Michael, our listeners would have tapped into this episode and they're quite intrigued with your organization, Piss Consumer as well as your journey and they would like to connect with you online. Where's the best place that they can find you online?

Speaker A: The best way is LinkedIn. I always join up with people who reach out and want to connect with me. So just look up Michael Podolski, best consumer you will find me. Uh, there are other Michael Padolski, but I'm the only one with the best consumer company associated. I'll be happy to connect with you.

Speaker B: Thank you so much for sharing. All right, well Michael, thank you so much for taking time out of your day to hop on our podcast and share about your organization, Piss Consumer, to share the value of organizations taking negative feedback more seriously. Because as you mentioned, 87% of consumers who do complain actually want to continue doing business with you. Or as you mentioned, 72% don't want other consumers to have a similar experience while they're sharing, you know, going online and sharing these reviews. And we just need to continue spreading that general awareness to organizations, regardless of their size and industry, to be in a space of being open to receiving that feedback and not looking at it as something that's detrimental, but more as an opportunity that they can use to to enhance and improve the quality of the interactions that their customers are having with their business, regardless of the channel that they're serving their customers on. So I think what you're doing is brilliant and I wish you all the very best as you continue to grow Peace Consumer and your many different businesses online. So thank you so much again.

Speaker A: Yannick, thank you very much for the experience. I really enjoyed being on the podcast. Let me know if I can be of any help.

Speaker B: All right, Just want to remind our listeners that you can follow us on X at, uh, navigatingcx or feel free to join our private Facebook group, Navigating the Customer Experience Community. Until next time, I'm your host, Yanique Grant.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening. For more awesome resources to take your customer service game to another level, head over to navigatingthecustomexperience.com see you next time.