Why it makes sense to ask for complaints.

In a traditional setting, feedback to an organization is often divided into two sorts: the compliments received, which are displayed on the worker’s floor like trophies or the ‘getting well’-cards some people display in a hospital, versus the complaints, which need to be addressed ‘To the Board’, are marked as ‘important’ by the general management, given to a super-specialist somewhere in the basement of the organization whose sole aim is to prevent the general manager be embarrassed in a consumer advocate program on TV.

Only very few organizations actively pursue customer feedback in a structured way. There are notable exceptions like organizations who very actively pursue a Net Promotor Score (NPS), make statistical analyses on them, and so come up with action programmes to drive change programs geared towards increasing the NPS (and the purchasing intentions behind it).

Other organizations spend small fortunes on another ‘sexy’ subject: market research, preferably executed by a big brand agency, so that the conclusions are shrouded in professionalism, and any mistakes do not end the career path for the buyer.

Here I would like to suggest a slightly different approach, which has only some small setbacks:

-relatively small budget, so no big internal exposure towards the Board;

– focused on existing customers, more focused on managing shrinking – or at least not growing – markets, so not focused on sexy ‘new’customers out in the ‘blue ocean’;

-fairly easy to obtain the first data, so no major obstacles to climb and show off your mountaineering skills.

The major advantage is that it provides a possibility to totally upset your data gathering: rather than just assembling all kinds of interesting customer service data (“the most frequently asked question is….”) where often it is unclear what action is derived from it, one will have to restructure the data according to the actual processes a customer goes through.

In an earlier blog (unfortunately for some readers in Dutch), I propose the following definition of a complaint: every(!) repetition or correction on a previous customer contact.

Where one could see all customer contact as a ‘fail’ for the producing company, because apparently the product is not intuitive enough to use or sufficiently failsafe (what I would call the ‘First step of the Rocket of Escalation’), this usually can only/should be solved in the primary processes of the producer. Again in general, this requires quite some effort. However, when you

• first organize and categorize your complaints in a sensible manner – otherwise the results will be useless – and
• then measure the repeated order/comment/complaint, you get a good measure where there is obvious waste in the customer support process. Fortunately, most consumers seem to feel the same and do not mind to order or change their product, only when they need to repeat their request they become annoyed.

The best way to improving your primary processes is to look at the incidence of your customer service requests, the best way to improving your customer service processes is to look at the incidence of your ‘complaints’.

In most instances, companies try to minimize their complaints, because it might result in bad publicity. But just imagine what impact one would have by saying: “I want to improve my customer service, therefore I want your complaint!”

Note: an additional aspect of this method that should be noted is that the Customer Service Manager/Director needs to obtain Board-backing beforehand, since otherwise she will be held accountable for the incredible increase in complaints that will take place under her responsibility.

(Originally published on July 25, 2013)