Your Fast Guide to Dealing with Complaints
Most organisations spend a lot of time and money trying
to identify customers who want to buy their products. Here, Roger Cartwright
explains that complaining customers are offering themselves up free!
Many people become defensive when dealing with complaints
because this is a person’s natural reaction to someone who is angrily
criticising their organisation or department in the case of an internal
customer complaint. Organisations seek to instil loyalty into their employees
but complaint situations are times when employees need to be honest and
objective. Within the bounds of commercial confidentiality it is counterproductive
to not be honest with the customer. Lying to the customer is nearly always
found out and only serves to make recovery more difficult. Dealing with
complaints requires three actions that have traditionally been carried
out in the order of:
Organisations have, traditionally, on receiving a complaint
carried out an investigation to see whether the complaint is justified.
If the customer has been found to be justified in making a complaint,
some form of remedy has been applied as an action and the organisation
has hopefully, learnt from what has happened and taken steps to ensure
that there is no repetition.
More modern thinking suggests that the order of the above
should be changed to put the action in rectifying the customer’s
complaint first and the investigation second. Organisations have argued
in the past that they need to carry out an investigation in order to prevent
spurious and even fraudulent claims. Such claims however are only a tiny
minority when compared to the majority of perfectly justified complaints.
If the sums of money involved are large then most customers would consider
an investigation reasonable, but when only small sums are in question
then immediate action is more likely to recover the situation and retain
customer goodwill than a long investigation. The investigation and learning
are still important even if there has been only one complaint, because
whether the complaint was justified or not the product or service has
angered one person, so it could anger someone else. The organisation needs
to find out what has happened and what lessons can be learnt.
People usually complain and may become difficult for a reason.
Whatever the staff of the organisation feel about the complaint, they
cannot deny the customer’s feelings of anger or disappointment and
that is what the organisation needs to deal with.
Customers do make mistakes but organisations need to bear
in mind that if one customer can make a mistake when using the product
or service, then others can too. There may be instructions on the packaging,
for example, that the organisation needs to change in order to prevent
further mistakes. Just as employees do not wish to admit a fault of the
organisation, customers may be embarrassed by having to admit that they
have made a mistake. Embarrassed customers can quickly become ex-customers.
If the organisation is in the right, then it is paradoxically
at its most vulnerable because that means that the customer is in the
wrong and it takes a great deal of tact to tell the customer that they
have made a mistake.
Customers who complain should, with the exception of professional
complainers, be thanked because they give the organisation an opportunity
to put whatever is wrong right, not only for that one customer but also
for others who are going to be acquiring the product or service in the
future. Complaints can also provide the organisation with the valuable
market research. Many organisations spend huge sums on market research
to find out what people like and dislike. The person who has complained
is offering the organisation free information. If justification for the
cost of customer recovery is needed this might well be it. By acting quickly
to put things right the organisation may save considerable sums in the
future, or be able to design new products and services in a better way
as a result of the customer feedback gained through complaints.
Complaining customers usually want to give the organisation
another chance. As Cartwright & Green (1997)* have pointed out, those
who walk away without complaining are really saying ‘Goodbye’.
They are saying: ‘You let me down and you won’t get another
chance’. Those who complain are saying ‘Hello’. They mean:
‘You have let me down but I want to give you a chance to make it
up to me’.
Most organisations spend a lot of time and money trying
to identify customers who want to buy their products. Complaining customers
are offering themselves up free!
* Cartwright & Green (1997) In Charge of Customer Satisfaction,
Blackwell.
Source: Extract from: Mastering Customer Relations by Roger
Cartwright (ISBN 0-333-69343-4). The book is part of the Macmillan Master
Series.
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