Complaints are the result of unresolved dissatisfaction earlier in the customer experience. In the vast majority of cases the dissatisfaction is evident days, weeks, sometimes months earlier than a complaint is lodged. Complaints are a customer’s cry for help.
I complain often, but only if my dissatisfaction has been ignored, I feel seriously affected or if I feel my whole customer experience has entered an inevitable downward spiral. Yet no-one ever makes me feel like they appreciate the gift of my complaint. No-one ever responds like they’ve heard my cry for help.
Organisations spend vast sums of money and considerable time soliciting feedback through market research. This is a worthwhile effort, but most organisations already have much of the information they seek in the midst of their customer complaints.
Customers invest more time giving you critical feedback in the form of a complaint than most ever will responding to one of your surveys and it is imperative, if we are to realise the value of complaints as engagement and improvement tools, that we respond to our customers’ eager communication of negative feedback in the moment. This is when they are receptive to probing questions about the source of their dissatisfaction.
Few customers respond to surveys and good response rates are becoming harder to achieve; fewer still provide usable quality information. So when a customer makes the effort and takes time to explain their dissatisfaction, often in detail, in the form of a complaint, you have to embrace it and seize the opportunity to open a valuable dialogue.
Complaints tend to come in unpredictable, bitty segments. They can arrive at any time, via any channel, on any topic and in a freeform format.
Making good use of them relies on the ability to capture the information provided, collate it with other customer information, analyse and make sense of it. It is far easier for an organisation to control and manage information that is sought in a batch, at a given point in time, with a prescribed format. Unsolicited feedback is trickier to manage, but arguably more insightful.
Unsolicited feedback tells a much richer story – free from leading questions. It shows you what elements of the service experience are most important to that customer and often betrays their strength of feeling and emotion on topics it would otherwise be difficult to get a clear opinion on.
It also often describes a bigger picture than survey questions can encompass, highlighting issues that exacerbate dissatisfaction and actions that will really resolve this.
When a customer complains they have committed to engaging with you. Often they are not just keen to talk to you, they are determined. Customer engagement marketing professionals would do anything for that level of investment in communication if it was branded as anything other than a complaint – a word that we have shrouded in negativity.
A lot of our clients are very focused on complaints at the moment and we recently brought together a group of brand name clients in the north west in a series of Collaborate on Complaints events. We shared experiences, compared and contrasted different approaches and challenged conventional thinking. It was a very productive session, with some interesting takeaways.
The definition of a complaint was an interesting area. Half the group had some form of regulation impacting their business and there was a tendency to allow the regulator’s definition to be their definition.
However, it soon became clear that this definition is flawed and didn’t match with the way their customers use the complaints process – and that this was a root cause for many inappropriate approaches to handling and reporting on complaints.
We explored organisational tendencies to place varying value on complaints lodged through different channels. Does a customer deem their complaint less important if they submit it via Twitter than they do if it is delivered as a traditional letter? It seems unlikely. So is it right that some organisations don’t accept or record complaints via social media? Or that some organisations will only accept complaints in writing? On the other hand, is it right that some organisations prioritise social media complaints because of their public visibility?
Another challenge came in the form of prescribed outcomes – if the complaint is X, then the resolution is Y. Again, we questioned how well this met customer expectations and whether customers should be encouraged to tell us exactly what they want to happen after they’ve complained.
If we can meet or exceed that expectation, great. If we can’t, why can’t we? Should we be able to? Sometimes the answer will be no, but by asking we can achieve more accurate and informed expectation management.
Beyond this collaborative session, there’s another final observation on a common failure many companies allow to happen when handling complaints.
Time and again when visiting clients, we observe the absence of an apology for things having gone wrong. This is a glaring error. Case studies show an apology significantly reduces the likelihood of the complaint escalating, in some cases by a third, and that has a significant cost benefit.
Customers are humans and we must remember to salve as well as solve.
Accepting complaints as a gift and acknowledging that, at the moment of complaining, a customer is more engaged in helping us resolve our issues than at any other time, is the first step towards achieving a huge behavioural and cultural shift – one that could revolutionise the performance and perception of UK utilities.
Nicola Eaton Sawford, managing director, Customer Whisperers