Building Better Customer Service With the Google “Sucks Index”

What is the Google “Sucks Index” (GSI)? Go to Google Search. Enter your company’s name followed by the word “sucks.” Hit return. Voilà! There before you in the results represents a summary of what you need to fix to provide better customer service.

This is the advice of Jeff Jarvis a professor at the City University of New York. According to Jarvis, the GSI for Wal-Mart turns up 165,000 results. Google itself has a GSI that totals 767,000.

Jarvis notes that while you might not like what you read in the results, at least these people are doing you a favor by pointing out things that may be irritating many of your customers—not just the ones angry enough to write about it. Think of the GSI as the opposite end of the spectrum of your Net Promoter Score.

The GSI makes sense, and it’s quicker and cheaper than conducting extensive marketing or customer satisfaction research. Not only that, the person who wrote the [insert company name here] sucks comment can probably be identified and you can follow up with this disgruntled customer or prospect to get more insight into what went wrong and what needs fixing.