If your community has a forum or other gathering place, you’ll recognize the Chronic Malcontent. This is the person who never posts anything positive. Everything she (or he) writes is negative. She nitpicks the service, nitpicks the web design, nitpicks customer support and anything else she can think of. She knows the private email address of everyone on the support team but would rather take her complaints public because she feels she has a better chance of getting a response, plus she wants people to agree with her.(In most cases they don’t).
The Chronic Malcontent is probably the most challenging of all the community forum personalities because:
- As community manager I have to be polite to everyone I come in contact with. Though I want to shake our chronic malcontent and say, “Get over it lady! This is a free service! If this free service is so much trouble find another silimar service that’s more to your liking. The fact that the Chronic Malcontent stays with us despite her daily laundry list of complaints is telling, because she doesn’t choose to go elsewhere.
- One has to act quickly with the Chronic Malcontent because we don’t want others in the forum taking up the same tone and turning the thread into a complaintfest. Usually I thank Ms.Malcontent for her comments and assure her I’ve passed her information on to the folks who can best handle it, and give her the email for our services team once again so she can contact directly next time. Which she won’t.
- I also have to be careful it doesn’t turn into a negative situation for the rest of the forum. Folks get sick of seeing constant whining from the same person and it’s only a matter of time before someone turns around and tells the Chronic Malcontent to shut up. Then others agree and before you know it you’re in moderation and delete mode.
Every now and then Chronic Malconent is worthy of an email or forum private message I’ll nicely ask her (or him) to please cool it with the negativity as it turns people off from visiting the forum. I’ll request she contact support directly for a quick response to her problems. She’ll send me a note back apologizing profusely and telling me how much she loves our service and how I’m the best community manager ever and she’s ever so sorry for any inconvenience. She really didn’t mean to be so negative. And then the process will start all over again the next week.
Does your forum have a chronic malcontent? If so, what do you do to diffuse the situation?
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Be careful not to label people as a Chronic Malcontent too quickly. They might just be wanting to help fix things but not being given an opportunity. Try giving the maybe-CM an opportunity to start fixing a problem they’re complaining about and see if they’re really a Perfectionist Participant: nothing’s ever quite right for them, but they improve things a lot along the way!
I have to deal with one of these on an almost daily basis. If I ever get the chance to meet him in real life I’ll give him ten seconds to start running and then all bets are off.
@Joel - the CM personality certainly doesn’t make our job easy. Rather than chase the chronic malcontent off with a 2 x 4, I’m trying to win her over with kindness. It’s a tough job but I feel I’m up to the task.
@MJ Ray - You are absolutely right. In fact it’s best to not label people at all…except when for the past year all they do is write to complain. Then maybe you have a case.
They may have been writing to complain for the past year, but is it just the same (type of) complaint? If so, have you tried dealing with it at all? Kindness is just stringing them along if there’s some bug in the website which they want to fix.
What’s up, is there anybody else here?
If it’s not just all bots here, let me know. I’m looking to network
Oh, and yes I’m a real person LOL.
Peace,