I must say that some of these websites tend to infuriate me.  In particular, I’ve had some experiences with HelloPeter where, although they ultimately dealt with and responded to my complaints, that we have been subjected to complaints which are clearly laid by competitors.  Interestingly enough, one of our competitors had a number of obviously fake compliments and some complaints listed against their name, and all of them were removed last year by the administrators of HelloPeter.  They have never given me an answer as to why.  

At de Broglio Inc we almost never get complaints about updating clients, because we have an unsurpassed updating system, nor about anything else of actual consequence, but we tend to get complaints that allege that an unnamed person at our office, whose name they cannot remember, either did not want to help them, or that we did not bother to assist them and take on their case.  In terms of the HelloPeter procedures one is entitled to then contact the person to try and resolve it and what I find interesting is that whenever there is what appears to me to be a malicious complaint, I find that the person on the other side will not actually answer the calls or reply to messages.  A recent complainant complained that we were not interested in his claim and did not bother to help him and when we pointed out that even now he still does not answer his phone or reply to any SMS messages, he just blithely replied that he has terrible phone reception where he is and cannot reply to any of his messages!  One wonders how, on a serious note, such a “potential client” ever intended doing business with us or expected us to be able to call them back and discuss the matter further, if they could not do so in repeated calls trying to follow up their complaint?  I have no doubt that HelloPeter can play a valuable role, although one wonders why one has to pay, as a company, to have the right to reply to complaints, but they certainly need to spend a lot more time removing invalid and nonsensical complaints which in most cases have clearly been laid by a competitor.  

From a personal point of view, I have not found HelloPeter useful, other than if there are an extraordinary number of complaints all about the same company.  For example, if you wanted to look into various cellular companies and who you are going to have the least problems with, HelloPeter is not really going to help you – because you are going to find that the complaints about the different companies, to a large extent correlate to their business share.  In other words, if you are a big business, of course you are going to have complaints and Cell C is obviously going to have much less complaints than Vodacom is, because Cell C has a much smaller share of the market.  It is only when the complaints are out of all proportion to that company’s share of the market that it would send out a signal.  

In another case a client, who subsequently withdrew the complaint, who complained on HelloPeter that although we advertise to help people we could not help in her case.  We had to politely point out to her that the reason we could not help with the loss of support case, relating to her late husband’s death, is that the evidence showed that he was drunk at the time when he crashed his motorbike and unfortunately passed away. So, people’s complaints, while they may sometimes be sincere, unfortunately on closer investigation have nothing to do with what the actual facts of the case are.