If a complaint occurs on the internet, does anybody hear it?

I’ve known about Google Alerts for awhile, but after Shari Storm’s (Verity CU) presentation at Net.Finance I finally realized that I can’t avoid it any loner and that I have to sign up. So I did. And the pay-off – the immediate pay-off – was remarkable.

On the same day that I signed up I was alerted through the service to a blog post made the previous day by one of our members commenting on a frustration he had at one of our ATMs. The same freakin’ day. It gave me chance to respond to the concern on the member’s blog, and to begin a discussion internally about some of our processes.

The obvious reason for not using Google Alerts is that if you can’t hear what they’re saying about you then you can say that everything is OK. I know, I know, this is a bad idea from start to finish, but it’s also a strangely powerful one.

So, thanks to Shari we’re now doing what we should’ve done all along: we’re monitoring the web.