Recently, I had the great opportunity to hear musician Dave Carrol speak about his experience becoming a YouTube sensation. If you’ve never heard of him, try searching “United Breaks Guitars” on YouTube or Google. And for those of you to lazy to do so, I’ll summarize: When United Airlines refused to deal with his claim that they had broken his guitar, Carrol wrote a song about it that went viral on YouTube, got him a lot of press attention and caused a 10% drop in United’s stock.

His story is one about the power of social media used well but Carrol has also become a symbol of what individual consumers can do when bad customer service allows them to be taken advantage of by large corporations.

Of course, not all of us are songwriters and the viral video thing has already been done.  But that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing left to do.  Bad customer service is something that most of us face pretty regularly and that can cause us to lose tons of time and money that we never planned to spend. If companies weren’t scared before Carrol’s video, they are now. Big businesses now know that you as the consumer are not powerless and that thanks to the internet, they probably don’t have a captive or uninformed audience anymore. So if something goes wrong and you decide to turn to customer support, here are some ideas that may help.

Do Your Research

This may seem obvious but it’s surprisingly easy to forget when you’re angry and could make your life a lot easier. First of all, make sure you’ve read all the fine print for whatever item or service you’ve paid for.  Have all of the information that you might need available like what credit card you used, when payments were made or what branch of a store you were in. If you can, find out the names of every employee who you dealt with. Assuming things don’t get resolved right away, it may even be helpful to know what your legal rights are.

Keep a Paper Trail

You probably don’t need to actually have anything signed by hand but don’t delete any emails and if you speak to people on the phone or in person, write down who you spoke to when and follow up with an email if possible.

Lodge a Complaint

If the company that you’re dealing with doesn’t resolve your problem to your satisfaction, there are a number of places where you can register your complaint in the hopes that you can at least warn future customers. The most common is the Better Business Bureau but you can also speak to the Federal Trade Commission or your state government. Services like Dave Carrol’s new Gripevine may also be able to help get your issue resolved or at least give you a forum to voice your complaint.

Use the Tools You Have

Carrol is a musician so he wrote a song. If you or a friend or family member are a lawyer (in which case, we probably don’t need to be telling you this) the send your complaint letter on law firm stationary. Even if there’s no way you would sue, it can help. If you are a journalist or blogger, write about it and spread the word. If you’re president of the PTA, get all the kids to write letters. Ok, that might be a bit far-fetched, but you get the idea. Be creative.

Don’t Back Down

Companies who rely on ignoring your complaints as a way of not dealing with them are counting on the fact that you’ll give up eventually. So don’t. Politely and calmly be really annoyingly persistent. And if you end up giving in and saying “Fine, but I’m never shopping here again.”, don’t ever shop there again. If enough of us stick to it, companies will be forced to change their policies.