The Customer Speaks It has been over ten years since the first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift was published. It''s embarrassing to admit that we naively believed poorly handled complaints would be a thing of the past as a result of the widespread distribution the original edition enjoyed. We heard a number of "wow" examples, such as a medical supply company in Kiev, Ukraine, that completely reorganized its approach to complaint handling based solely on the contents of the Russian-translated version. With examples like this from around the world, we assumed we''d soon be able to stop talking about complaints--even though we would miss that. Complaints are a fun topic for speeches. Stories about poorly handled complaints arouse a great deal of eye rolling and tongue clucking. We thought everyone would have understood that complaints are gifts. It didn''t happen.
In a 2006 survey of 3,200 U.S. and European consumers, 86 percent of respondents said their "trust in corporations has declined in the past five years."1 In 2007, RightNow Technologies reported that after suffering a negative service experience, 80 percent of U.S. adults decided to never go back to that company 74 percent registered a complaint or told others 47 percent swore or shouted 29 percent reported they got a headache, felt their chest tighten, or cried 13 percent fought back by posting a negative online review or blog comment2 2 Finally, a Gallup poll commissioned by the Better Business Bureau, conducted between August 22 and September 8, 2007, found that 18 percent of adult Americans said their trust in business had dropped in the last year. Yet 93 percent of those surveyed said a company''s reputation for honesty and fairness is extremely important to them. The report concludes that if companies don''t deliver what they promise (the source of most complaints), customers will go somewhere else.
3 It''s not a pretty picture. While the ideas from this book have influenced a great many people, companies still get things wrong, and customers continue to complain-- if we''re lucky. Service providers too often either blame customers for the mistakes they complain about or make them prove their positions. In many cases, they take so long to respond that customers forget what they complained about when they finally hear back from organizations. Customers frequently are forced to talk with robotic electronic voice systems that feebly attempt to replicate real conversations, and unfortunately, in some cases, these exchanges are better than live human interactions. And we won''t even cite the statistics for how long customers wait on telephones to talk with someone. When they finally are connected with a live person, it''s often someone living halfway around the world who reads from a script. Many customers become so frustrated with this type of communication that by the time they get to talk with someone, they start out angry and are automatically labeled problem customers--even though they may have been trying to buy something or have a simple question answered.
The deck is stacked against businesses trying to satisfy their customers. Customers expect satisfactory service. As a result, unsatisfactory service stands out. Because it stands out, it is more likely to be remembered and weighed more heavily compared to everything that went right. Ten transactions can go right, but that one mistake is what grabs consumer attention. This reality demands that we focus on what we can learn from customers who aren''t happy.4 Organizations, however, don''t seem to learn from their customers, as witnessed by the fact that most consumers face repeats of the very problems they already complained about. Most importantly, many service providers still see complaints as something to be avoided, as indicated by the fact that many organizations continue to pay bonuses to their managers based on reductions in complaints.
Yet surveys conducted around the world demonstrate over and over again that companies with the best-rated service in their industry are the most profitable. It''s really that simple. And complaint handling is an integral part of that service rating.3 It is true that many people and organizations have learned how to handle complaints better. Several large companies have instituted sophisticated technological approaches to more efficiently respond to complaints. And many companies educate their staff in the best ways to respond to upset customers. But every year, a new group of service providers show up to work in organizations around the world--fresh representatives who haven''t had the advantage of the training offered by their employers. (Given the high rate at which call-center staff leave their jobs, they probably wouldn''t have much use for that knowledge in any case.
) Every year, new types of complaints are presented by consumers. Eager and desperate managers somehow continue to delude themselves into thinking that the best tactic is to eliminate all the problems that create complaints, as if zero defects is actually attainable. And today, twelve years since A Complaint Is a Gift hit the bookshelves, more and more complaints are made public on the Internet, posted in vitriolic tones by dissatisfied customers. Because of what customers are forced to endure, many call-center staff regularly have to serve unpleasant, upset customers whom they personally did nothing to create. Yet to be good service providers, they must be able to calm these customers down and deal with them in a way that makes them want to return to do business again at some time in the future. Unfortunately, many staff take customer bad behavior just as personally as customers take the bad service they have been offered, and staff defensive reactions leak out onto customers. Is it any wonder that most call centers have such a difficult time holding on to staff unless they offer the best-paying jobs in the area? This rapid and regular loss of staff requires constant hiring of new, untrained staff. As a result, many call centers do not have staff who know how to effectively handle complaints, let alone understand that a complaint is being delivered unless it is spelled out with the precise words "I have a complaint.
"4 Academic research on complaint handling hasn''t revealed earth-shaking new information since we surveyed studies for the original book. Greater and greater refinement, however, of what happens in the complaint process has been achieved over the past ten years. For example, more research has been conducted on differences of complaining styles between different national groups.5 This more detailed knowledge about consumer behavior has opened up additional areas to be researched. Here''s our conclusion after reading hundreds of research studies: The more we know about service recovery, the more complex our understanding becomes. The more we know, the more we need to know to get the results we want with service recovery. The more we know, the more we need to experiment to see what works in specific situations. While specific data may have changed, the research conducted in the 1960s through the 1990s has, more or less, held into the 2000s.
No complaints there! In fact, it would be scary to think that a completely new understanding about complaints has popped up, necessitating an entirely new approach to complaint handling. Bottom line: the concept that a complaint is a gift holds true today as much as it did over ten years ago. Complaints are never going to go away, and organizations and their staffs need to adopt a strategy that enables them to recover customer loyalty when things go wrong. What''s Changed What has changed is that many organizations, led in this direction by very convincing research,6 have gained a deeper understanding about how important effective complaint handling--service recovery, as it has been referred to since the early 1980s--is in retaining loyal customers. These organizations understand the cost they pay in loss of both customers and staff when upset and dissatisfied customers are not handled well.5 Several organizations have also come to recognize that effective service recovery is an important part of creating powerful brands. In 2004, Branded Customer Service (by authors Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart) examined the importance to brands of effective complaint handling.7 The conclusion: customers are remarkably forgiving of brands with promises that are not initially delivered as long as brand representatives respond to customers effectively, make good on original promises, and demonstrate that matters are improving.
It also helps if the brand has a strong market image. One big key here is to rein in the marketing department so it does not make promises that the rest of the organization can''t deliver.8 Janelle Barlow also coauthored Emotional Value during this period.9 Emotional Value went into depth on how broken promises, mistakes, and inappropriate treatment affect customers emotionally. Some customers will accept outrageous mistakes as long as service providers are sincere, helpful, and concerned. At least they''ll accept mistakes if they don''t regularly recur. If staff maintain an attitude that feedback is one of the best types of communication they can have with customers, strategically they start off on the right foot to build emotional value with customers. Saying "thank you" for negative feedback is just as powerful today as it was a dozen years ago.
More importantly, the strategy behind thanking for feedback is even more important today than it was in 1996. Our mind-sets really do influence how we respond to our customers, and "complaints as gifts" is.