A Complaint Is a Gift: Using Customer Feedback as a Strategic Tool - Softcover

Barlow, Janelle; Møller, Claus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576755827 ISBN 13: 9781576755822

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A customer complaint is the most valuable source of feedback you can receive to improve your business. This new and improved second edition guides you through responding to complaints, taking advantage of when complaints become personal, and how you, too, can complain constructively and effectively.
 
The first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift introduced the revolutionary notion that customer complaints are not annoyances to be dodged, denied, or buried but are instead valuable pieces of feedback—in fact, they’re your best bargain in market research. Customer complaints can give businesses a wake-up call when they’re not achieving their fundamental purpose: meeting customer needs. Complaints provide a feedback mechanism that can help organizations rapidly and inexpensively strengthen products, service style, and market focus. Most importantly, complaints create a moment of truth when a customer who is deciding whether to return can be made even more loyal.
 
Using numerous real-life examples, authors Janelle Barlow and Claus Møller show precisely how to handle complaints in a way that brings benefit to your organization and satisfaction to your customers–even when you have to say no. The second edition features two brand-new chapters on receiving and responding to complaints online; a new section on how to deal with and take advantage of complaints that are directed at your personally; and, turning the tables, a section on how you can complain constructively and effectively. And throughout, the text has been heavily revised, with a wealth of new examples, tools, and strategies.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janelle Barlow is president and owner of TMI US. She is the coauthor of Emotional Value, Smart Videoconferencing, and Branded Customer Service.

Claus Møller is the founder of TMI. He has written several books on management, which together have sold more than three million copies.

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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

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1576755827
• ISBN 13: 9781576755822
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Berrett-Koehler; https://www.dc.com/tv; ; 1333 Broadway Suite P-100; Oakland; CA; 94612; USA
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