Gripe Presentation. Gripe, Resolve Complaints By Wielding Your Social Clout. Gripe attempts to capitalize on the human propensity to complain about things as well as the increasing importance of online influence and power.
Its location-based mobile app is based on the premise that people want the ability to press a button and resolve grievances towards local businesses and service providers. Gripe uses as leverage a person’s online reach and influence, namely the number of Twitter and Facebook followers and the reach of those followers to turn “turn complainers into customers.” It also takes status badges on services like Tripadvisor into consideration as somewhat of a threat in order to get a service providers attention and resolve the problem. Gripe users, using their real names, can either share a “Gripe” or a “Cheer” through the app as an incentive to get business owners to be more accommodating to search for businesses that you want to Gripe about.
A business can claim their Gripe account and use it to resolve “Gripes.” C: how do you make money? Gripe wants to build a business around your Twitter complaints. Many of you have probably had the experience of being furious at a business, then going to Facebook or Twitter to complain about it.
If you’re lucky, the business may even have responded to that complaint. Now a startup called Gripe has built an app around that process, one that it says will be useful for both consumers and businesses. Consumers can write a complaint in the app, post it to the Web, then share links to their complaint on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. So after you’ve downloaded the application, you can pull it out if you’re in the middle of an unsatisfying customer service experience. The app shows the number of your social network connections — not just friends, but friends of friends. Of course, the idea of confronting someone that way might not appeal to you (it terrifies me). Gripe’s revenue plan involves selling its services to businesses so they can resolve complaints, and also potentially running advertising or charging for premium consumer features.
Gripe. Gripe ( is a free location-aware mobile app that lets people use their word-of-mouth power to publicly share complaints (or cheers) about millions of local or national businesses or service providers worldwide (restaurants, hotels, bars, plumbers, attorneys, etc.), so that they are heard and resolved, likely, on the spot. Every incident report (gripe or cheer) is sent by Gripe to the business for response, while quickly spreading through friends, followers and beyond. By resolving gripes businesses turn net detractors who would be sharing complaints with their friends, followers and beyond, into net promoters spreading cheers (positive word-of-mouth) about the business to everyone they know.
As such Gripe can be seen as a must have app for consumers and a highly efficient customer acquisition strategy for merchants. Gripe is free and available for download on iOS and Android, or on the web at: Milestones Gripe added Kai Gradert as Director of User Experience. (4/1/10) Videos.