Why getting complaints is good
Dealing with complaints - You either love it or loathe it.
Remember, complaints are FREE feedback on what your business is doing wrong.
You avoid paying an expensive consultant to do any research for you. You don’t have to spend money on “focus groups” and other trendy ideas.
If you just listen to what customers say, they will tell you what is making them unhappy and won’t charge you.
If you want to be really dangerous - you can actually ask customers what is troubling them.
The thing is, (and it doesn’t seem to be very well understood) is that, in general terms,
“people actually want the goods and services they request and pay for”
They really would prefer to order a TV and have it delivered when it was supposed to rather than getting into a rally of complaints and phone calls.
Now, you may be thinking that this will just encourage customers to complain all the more and that we are going to start with “the customer is always right” stuff.
No
The customer is not always right. These days, customers are increasing rude, bad tempered, bad mouthed and misinformed. But they have the right to be listened to and you need to ignore the hype and deal with the issue at hand.
At least one local authority we have come across has a dedicated “Difficult customer officer”. The council has recognised that some complaints are silly and the customer is deliberatly trying to “play off” one officer or council department against another.
In these cases, the council has cut their loses (because the person, however annoying they may be, will still pay council tax and be entitled to local services) and deals with the complaints in one stroke.
(This useful post on failure demand shows how organisations can actually make work for themselves).