What is the problem Shonkr addresses?
Many disappointed customers feel so much fury towards the companies from which they buy that they wish to take revenge by warning other potential customers of just how awful their experience has been.
But many businesses choose never to hear how angry consumers get, they remain oblivious to the rotten customer experience (CX) they deliver, and they don’t respond. Worse, in their imperiousness, they show they simply don’t care.
It is these companies which most urgently need to be undone publicly.
The customers’ problem has been that until now, there has been no channel by which their rage can be channelled, directed and amplified to help them exact their vengeance.
But now, in Shonkr, there is.
What is the Shonkr solution?
Comparison engines have been developed to help customers reduce risk and save money.
Those like choice.com.au, comparethemarket.com.au, finder.com.au and canstar.com.au typically attempt to apply expert knowledge and systems to help customers find the best product choice and price.
But, while Shonkr is a natural extension to this trend, it works differently, and its goal is to play at the other end of the field. It tracks and reports on the level of consumers’ dissatisfaction, anger, distrust, sheer bloody mindedness and motivation to complain as a result of the customer experience they receive.
Within its running journalistic investigation, by aggregating links those customers’ individual posts of complaint on Facebook, Twitter and wherever else they care to place them, Shonkr effectively becomes a catalogue of Australian customer dissatisfaction, and of the companies which have caused it.
It creates an index of businesses with vocally unhappy customers, and, for those who are increasingly reliant on social media, influencers and the discontent of others for their most valuable buying advice, it is simply a creation of its time.
Further, by offering its own proven template as a guide to what works when complaining publicly on social media, and publishing what it subsequently learns to improve on this, it will also enable them to ensure their complaints are heard and acted on more effectively than before.
Companies aiming to lift their competitive CX game should heed its warnings.
The reputations of all businesses are increasingly vulnerable to increasing social communication capability and the will to act of the most aggrieved customers.
Using this lever, Shonkr will fuel media attention into companies which least desire its attention, and will provide businesses with a competitive imperative to act by ascribing to them and their rivals a CX metric of customer discontent, against which each will be measured.
The ultimate barometer of any business’s health is its ability to attract and retain customers. Akin to the non-financial declarations of an ESG statement, the emergence of Shonkr points clearly to the ways in which companies will need to report to investors on how they intend to stay in business by delivering improving CX promises.
Shonkr’s sister company, Cloud Citizen, intends to assist those businesses by using what it learns to create their customer-attracting CX statements of intent and the customer-focused business transformations this reorientation demands, and related CX shareholder reporting-related services.