This is one dissatisfied customer who wants to tell 3,000,000 (or 30,000,000, or just keep adding zeros).

Being somewhat new to the “online complaining method” of putting up a protest, I am still navigating my way around the Internet to other complaint sites.  Mine is, of course, specific to credit card companies (and inspired by my own personal experience, but fueled by my concerns for consumers and the impact that credit cards have on small businesses).  But, other complaint sites are more general (and that’s great for consumers).  Although I am royally aggravated at Chase right now, some of these sites give me hope, in that they are a testament to the fact that even when credit card companies shove their attitudes down our throats about what they can do, because it’s legal (they know that they have the most powerful lobbyists and regulators that money can buy — and they seem to really enjoy rubbing that in our faces), we can fight back in numerous other ways.

There really is no changing one dynamic: as customers who can — through singular and collective action — strike back, we can march forward knowing that in the end, no business can survive without at least some of us.

Occasionally, I am running across information about individuals whom I think I would really like to meet, and I am okay simply admiring them from a distance.   One such person is Pete Blackshaw, co-founder of the 2004 Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and even more relevant to my present journey and fight against credit card company abuses, founder of PlanetFeedback.com. 

His new book, “Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000” looks like just the kind of inspiration that I need.  It’s New Year’s day, January 1, 2009.  This is the day when Chase’s change in terms notice takes effect.  Here I am, blogging (working, fighting, just a little over an hour before midnight, January 2, 2009), but Pete, I have to “tip my hat to you” for all that you have already done, long before I arrived here, in pursuit of my own agenda trying to combat the abusive treatment of consumers by credit card companies.  May your book sell out, and be reprinted many times!

With all due respect to the catchy title, however, this is one dissatisfied customer who wants to tell 3,000,000 (or 30,000,000, or just keep adding zeros).