PART FIVE:  LOS ANGELES BBB --  THE COMPLAINT PROCESS CONTINUED

This is the fifth of a ten part investigative report into the standards and practices of the Better Business Bureau of the Southland, Inc., here-in-after referred to as the LA BBB.  This ten part report is the result of months of research, interviews, and information supplied or confirmed by a highly placed LA BBB employee of long standing who has requested confidentiality.

THE ANATOMY OF A COMPLAINT PART 2
A DISSECTION OF THE COMPLAINT HANDLING PROCESS OF THE LOS ANGELES BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU

Once a complaint has found its way into the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau database, the clock starts ticking.  The results can be disastrous.  Better Business Bureau websites (the overwhelmingly favorite way the consumer access BBB reports on business) are dynamically generated.  This means that they are generated on-the-fly when you check out a business.  These web pages get created in nano-seconds by pulling information from the BBB database and displaying it to you in the format you see on the screen.  When the clock strikes midnight, the database is updated with the complaints entered for that day by the BBB staff.  This is the same database that has six employees inputting the majority of complaints—those that come in via the Internet.  When you do the math you discover that the average complaint gets 15 minutes of consideration before being entered into the system.  Consideration consists of matching the complaint to the actual business being complained about (which is harder than you think), assigning a severity level to the complaint, and filtering it for profanity. 

NOTE 1: The actual time spent on this assigning process is less because the same people who are inputting complaints are also dealing with the follow-up on complaints at they get answered and go through the resolution process.

NOTE 2: The information the LA BBB uses on a non-member company is derived from either a complaint, scraping of information from the internet, a lexis/nexis search, and in rare instances, from actually contacting the company in question seeking information—usually in the context of a telemarketing cal (“Hi, I’m from the LA BBB and we recently received a complaint about your business.  If you sign up for membership in the LA BBB we will help you handle this complaint.”) which is a strange context to be asking about company information.

Once the database is updated, a short ten to fifteen minute process, the database then sets about automatically contacting the business that was complained about.  The first step is to send out an email notifying the business that they have a complaint.  For member businesses, this is not a problem as they gave the BBB their correct email address.  For non-member businesses who somehow are in the database (see NOTE 2 above), the email that exists for them is often unverified, having been obtained just like email addresses are obtained for all businesses about whom no prior database record existed – by scraping the Internet.  There is no verification that the information for non-member businesses that is on record with the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau is correct.

At this point, one of three things can happen:  the email can be delivered to the right person at the right company; the email can bounce back; or the email can be missing in action—caught in a spam filter, received by the wrong person or the wrong business, or ignored as many unsolicited emails are in the normal course of business.   The point is that no return receipt is sent with the email so the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau assumes any complaint bearing email that does not bounce back has been received by the correct party.  They have no evidence to the contrary.

If the email does bounce, then the next step is to fax the complaint to the business.  Like the email process, this is a fully automated procedure, untouched by human hands.  At this point, one of two things can happen: either the fax goes through or it doesn’t.  If the fax goes through to the fax number on file, the Los Angeles BBB again assumes the complaint has been received by the correct party.  Again, there is no confirmation that the fax has actually been received, and certainly no confirmation that the fax was sent to the right person at the right business.

Finally, if the fax does not go through, the automated complaint notification process proceeds to the third and final step and prints out a letter to be mailed to the address on file for the business.  Once the letter has been mailed, the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau again assumes the complaint has been received by the business the complaint has been filed against.

The way the IT (Internet Technologies) Department of the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau programmed the system is really quite elegant, at least from their own perspective.  With minimal labor (essentially limited to putting complaint letters in envelopes and stamping them for complaints that had bad email and fax information), the LA BBB database generates over a thousand complaint notifications a week with almost no labor.

Unfortunately for the small business, there are a multitude of things that can go wrong with this database driven, complaint notification system.  There are many assumptions made on the information about a non-member business contained in the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau database.  There are many more assumptions made concerning whether or not a non-member business ever received the complaint.  The old saying ASSUME makes an ASS out of U and ME comes to mind.  Even techies have a word for this: GIGO.  Garbage In—Garbage Out.

No confirmations--just assumptions--that a business got BBB’s notification of complaint or understood the ramifications of not answering BBB (regardless of whether they answer complaint or not).  It’s a veritable certainty that some complaints never make it to the business in question.  As we shall see in a later part of this series, one answered complaint can ruin a business’ reputation AND the business can be completely unaware the complaint even exists.

From the Los Angeles BBB website, here’s what happens next: 

The complaint process generally takes a few weeks to a month or more. Here is a brief summary of the process:

• We make every effort to obtain a response to your complaint by sending at least two requests to the business. Each request allows the business some ten business days to respond. If the company responds, as they do in most cases, you will be given the opportunity to provide a rebuttal. If you do, we then ask the company for its final comments within seven business days.
• If the company does not respond, though, we will close the complaint with the appropriate closing status and notify both you and the business. The entire process should take from two to six weeks.

There’s one other thing that often takes place when a complaint is filed.  Telemarketing!  When a complaint is used as the premise to originate a sales call, it’s tough to take the complaint seriously, or to not respond in anger to what would appear to be not much more than a shakedown attempt.

As a business man, why would I want to involve a middleman in the complaint process of my company?  It slows me down, it makes the whole process that much more involved, and the majority of the time it serves no purpose in resolving the dispute to either party’s satisfaction.

Much like Google has a Chinese wall between their ad revenue model and their organic (free) search engine rankings, the Los Angeles Better Business Bureau needs to insulate the complaint process from the sales process.  All indications are that under current thinking, this is not something likely to be considered.  With complaints driving the telemarketing process and telemarketing driving the entire Los Angeles BBB operation, we are in a “tail wagging the dog” situation which lends little, if any, credibility to the organization.