By A. Abeku Haywood-Dadzie

According to Charles R. Swindoll, "Life is ten percent of what happens to you and ninety percent of how you respond to it." That is to say, what matters is how you respond to what happens to you.To situate this in customer complaint handling and management, compliant is 10% of the rage you receive from customers and 90% of how you respond or react to it, so that it is not the way and manner in which a complaint is made that matters, but the way and manner in which it is responded to. In the words of Captain Jack Sparrow, "The problem is not the problem." The problem is your attitude to the problem. "

Not long ago, I worked for a telecommunications company that catered to residents of Florida, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. The first day I sat as a pilot by my boss to pick up a call, I had a baptism of fire during a "moment of truth" situation at the contact centre. The customer went like this: "Abeku, I really like your service and how professional you people sound, but... and you won't like what comes next." However, with the assistance of my mentor, at the conclusion of the talk, the same customer who had before sounded as if he was standing behind an intercontinental ballistic missile, stated in a refreshing tone, "Thank you."

Every organisation experiences one problem or the other. Occasionally, products that performed admirably during universal acceptance testing [UAT] and soft launch fail miserably during commercial launch.No matter how excellent the key performance indicators [KPIs] look, during the planning and development stage of a product, there will always be a disparity, a margin of error between the test and the actual environment. In short, things go wrong, and that’s life. Every organisation must learn to accept this, not encourage or promote mediocrity, but ensure that there is always a plan B. The key learning point for organisations is that it’s not the challenges that arise out of these unforeseen incidents that are the issue, but the "attitude" of the organisation during the " negative moment of truth" that sets one origination apart from another.

What is a complaint?

A complaint is an "expression of dissatisfaction made to or about an organization, related to its products, services, staff or the handling of a complaint, where a response or resolution is explicitly or implicitly expected or legally required" (as defined by the Australian/New Zealand Standard AS/NZS 10002:2014, Guidelines for complaint management in organizations (as amended)).

More often than not, gaps exist between what customers expect and what they get, or what an organisation thinks customers expect and what customers actually expect. This dissonance often ignites anger, rage, and fury in customers. Unfortunately for customers [because they are humans], during the state of anxiety, psychologists indicate that a portion of the brain known as the hypothalamus simultaneously activates the sympathetic nervous system and the adrenal-cortical system to produce a "fight-or-flight response." The overall effect of this is that the body speeds up, tenses up, and becomes generally very alert. Most customers in this state lose their ability to communicate effectively since it becomes almost impossible for them to separate facts from emotions. Some then become rude or angry for a variety of reasons, some of them justified, some not. Handling such customers can be very challenging, whether they confront you face-to-face or you speak with them over the phone.

But what do customers want? When a customer complains, they crave for the satisfaction of two needs; human and professional. They want to be listened to and have their issues resolved; they want "staff who are courteous and pleasant"; they want "staff who will be sensitive and show empathy to their problems and requests"; they want staff who will listen to their complaints because they want to understand and not because they want to reply; and they want staff who will resolve their issues promptly. Unfortunately, more often than not, customer complaints are met with fury, anger, annoyance, and irritation from some organizations. These counter reactions from some organisations are as a result of the fact that some see such complaints in a negative way, a blame that is being attributed to their organization instead of viewing such complaints from the customer’s perspective, and the fact that they have not met the expectations of the customer. This behaviour usually has a devastating consequence for organizations.

Organizations with such a service mindset do not appreciate the quote by Mahatma Gandhi. "A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.

Customers are kings and queens and are always right. Even when they are wrong, they remain royals. This simply means that solving the problem is often more important than who is right. Customers today don’t think twice about going elsewhere if they are not getting the experience they expect from their service provider. Technological advancement has changed the rules of engagement and tipped the balance of power towards customers. Today, it’s easier than ever for customers to switch suppliers and service providers as they have more choice than ever. Hitherto, customer complaints used to be a unit or department within an organisation with a series of front office and back office functions. Today, the old distinction between front office and back office is gradually disappearing as service is currently everybody's business.

It is said that "every customer has a ‘silent vote"; that is, "I will not buy again, but I will not tell you." This is a statement of fact. Research into customer complaint management indicates that only 4% of dissatisfied customers complain, while 96% leave without any communication to the organization. This is because they think it is not worth the time and effort and some do not even know where to go to complain. Of the 96% who leave, 91% may never return. A typical dissatisfied customer will tell 8-10 people about the issue with an organisation significantly more in communication. One in five dissatisfied customers will tell 20 people about the issue with their organization. It takes 12 positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident. 7 out of 10 complaining customers will do business again with you if your organisation resolves their complaints in their favor. 95% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaints at first contact. On average, a satisfied complainer will tell five people about their problem and how it was resolved. It costs six times more to attract new customers than it does to maintain current ones. Customer loyalty is worth 10 times the price of a single purchase. Above all, 66% of customers leave because of the attitude of employees in the organization. [TARP, Michael Leboeuf, Lee Resource Inc, NOP, The White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC, Ruby Newell-Legner]

According to Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, "If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends." If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 " 

There is a positive relationship between a customer’s turner, loyalty, and worth. Customers with long turners are usually loyal, buy more, take less of an organization's time, are less sensitive to price, bring new customers, project the image of an organization, add to the organization's credibility and reputation, and best of all, they have no acquisition or set up cost. 

Complaints are golden opportunities and gift packages waiting to be opened. It’s a proven fact that customers can often be more loyal to an organisation after they have experienced a service failure, than if it had never happened in the first place. If a customer complains, it's a chance to retain that customer. If a customer is complaining, it's a way of saying to an organization; "you are not treating me well, but I am not ready to go yet." A plea to stay with the organisation .Organizations must therefore see complaints in a positive light because it offers them the opportunity to gain more insight into their customer’s requirements and bridge all grey areas. Where complaints are handled properly, it improves the reputation of an organization, strengthens customer confidence, and builds advocates for the organization. "

Effective management of customer complaints has a lot of benefits. Some of these benefits include: improved customer experience, opportunity to partner with customers, increased satisfaction among employees, employers, and customers. It’s imperative that everyone realise that the purpose of complaints management is to understand the root cause of a problem and not to apportion blame. If the notion of blame targeting becomes the objective, then the factual information required will not be forthcoming and the process will collapse. " The only way an organisation can turn complaints into a "service" experience for the customer is to see all complaints as valuable opportunities to demonstrate that it really values its customers and cares about their views. This can be achieved by equipping all employees with the skills to confidently handle any complaint in a way to always win the customer back. Again, to win the service war, the complaints management process should be part of an organization's induction training. It’s also key for employees to understand the true value of customer complaints, so that they can focus on the positive value of complaints to help build an efficient organization.

According to Fredrick Reichheld, by searching for the root cause of customer complaints, organisations with the desire and the capacity to learn can identify practises that need fixing and can sometimes win the customer back and reestablish the former relationship on firmer grounds. Ironically, useful lessons are not closely related to the quantity or quantum of information available. If it were, we would all be swimming in skills and expertise. Useful learning is instead a matter of getting the right information to the right people and giving them reasons to want to use it.

When all is said and done, a complaint is a gift, and it’s twice blessed; it blesses the complainant and the complainee. In conclusion, "We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations by Charles R. Swindol." 

What tools can be used to effectively manage customer complaints and how can an organisation learn from customer defections?