One of the most nebulous and yet most important concepts for any company is reputation. If your company has a reputation for screwing the customer, no matter how erroneous or true it is, customers will see every action that light. On the other hand, if your company has a reputation for doing good stuff when they didn’t need to, then your every action falls under that light too.

Unfortunately, reputation isn’t some amorphous blob where every action has a visible and measurable consequence. Take for example my conversation with my Aunt last weekend. She was saying how the american car companies deserved to fail because of the low quality of their vehicles. I tried to explain that that was the past, and GM and co. have drastically changed. They have great quality vehicles, great safety ratings, and great mileage. But because of the reputation they earned in the 70′s and 80′s for low quality vehicles, my aunt would not listen. Even when she began to accept my argument, she changed her justification to, “Well, maybe, but you need more parts for them!” This is a phenomenon that has been called The Conservation of Outrage. She had it set in her mind, rightly or wrongly, that GM’s cars sucked. So no matter what I said, she would find a justification. Unfortunately, I had no information on the rate of part replacement for american vehicles so I couldn’t argue the point. But if I had, she very likely would have continued coming up with justifications, like erroneous mileage beliefs, appearance, american cars are somehow more wasteful in manufacturing than japanese cars, and so on.

This is by no means to say that my Aunt is silly or mis-informed. She believes what she believes, and it is her right to do so. She is in fact quite normal. Most of the population would behave the same way without realizing it. This is why reputation is so very, very important to companies.  Once you have earned the reputation, right or wrong, people will justify it however they can.

Because of the Conservation of Outrage as a phenomenon, that means companies have to be pro-active about reputation. They need to react in a timely and proper manner to complaints and articles. If someone twitters about yoru company, and it is negative, you need to act, right away, to solve the problem. But rather than being reactive, be pro-active. By pro-active, I mean you need to have customer advocates at the very top of the hierarchy, whose job is to ensure the customers are happy and satisfied. By pro-active, I mean that you need to evaluate all of the policies and processes in the company, from shipping, to customer service, to warranty handling, and evaluate them for they treat the customer. You want to eliminate phone-circles;  that policies that managers on the ground dealing with the customer sometimes disagree with but are punished by their superiors for not following should be revised to give your managers more judgement; that every action of the company takes into account the balance between profit, and making the customer happy.

There is of course always going to be a customer that will be unhappy no matter what you do, unless the company loses money to appease them. I’ve encountered customers like this. But usually, despite all their anger and bluster, they know they are in the wrong, and trying to get away with it. This means despite all their loud complaints and so on, they won’t tell anyone. They’d be too embarassed to. If they tried to complain to a larger body, they’d just be laughed at. If they do manage to twist the story against you, then most places will want to hear your side, in the interests of it making an interesting story. That is when you are reactive, watching for erroneous complaints that still occur despite your best efforts.

This applies even to organizations that don’t make a profit, like Python, Pygame, and so on. In fact, this applies especially to FOSS organizations. They got a bad reputation in the 90′s for arrogant, self-serving, potty-mouthed gurus lording it over new users and programmers. Its been a very hard image for people to shake, with even a slightly, even rightly, supercilious tone to a user confirming that image. Even if they no longer believe it, they find other reasons to continue the outrage. FOSS organizations need to take every effort to make things work, from including documents on dependencies and compilation(I’m looking at you SDL_ffmpeg!), to maintaining a positive and welcoming community(Thanks Pygame and Python people!).