Complaints Handling Case Study
John Sills
Managing Partner at The Foundation. Author of The Human Experience. Trustee of Young Enterprise. Part-time Writer, Professional Commuter.
Those of you that have read my book (and if you haven’t, I’d love it if you did!)?will now know about the greatest customer experience I’ve ever experienced.?It was with Swiss Rail, and taught me the three things organisations need to do when a customer has a problem:
It won’t surprise you to know I’m a regular correspondent with complaint teams (we all have a folder on our laptops with our favourite complaint letters in, don’t we?) so I thought I’d share some stories of the past few weeks to show what good looks like - and what really it really doesn’t.?
A few weeks ago, I headed to York for a belated celebration of my 40th?birthday (those who have seen me recently may think the celebration had been delayed for 15 years).
Beforehand, everything was suspiciously easy. LNER did a great job group booking our tickets. The hotel helped sort us six rooms for eleven people at a good price. The football team we were going to watch even started winning matches.
Things were going so well that, as we walked up the stairs to the hotel, we were laughing that this trip was so much better organised than my stag do. ‘Let’s not say that until we’ve checked in!’ I said, jokingly.
Except, it turns out, it was less of a joke and more of a premonition.
‘I’m sorry sir, the hotel has no water, and we may have to close tonight. I’ll call you later and let you know’
Ah.
Around 6pm, we got a call to say, good news! They’d identified the problem, and the part was on its way. From London. And would arrive around 4am in the morning. But… the hotel would still need to close tonight. We could go to another of their hotels four miles away (which the manager said was a bad option given the taxis we’d need), or we could find somewhere else to stay and get a refund.
We took the final option, and when I got home the next day, I emailed the company to say that the other hotel had cost ￡100 more – that’s less than ￡10 per person - due to it being late notice, and could they refund me the difference?
It took me around 10 minutes on the website to find out how to get in touch, eventually having to settle for a ‘give us feedback!’ option. Several days later I got a response. And it wasn’t what I was expecting:
We had several emails back and forward, with no attempts or offers to speak on the phon. Eventually I was offered a ￡30 gift voucher. But, of course, you rarely get a hotel room for ￡30, so that would simply mean spending more money with them.
I was delighted to hear the feedback is valuable and will help them improve, though.
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Compare and contrast that response with the one I got from EE.?
I’d upgraded my contract and essentially asked for the same again, but with 5G. The agent was brilliant, super-friendly, and with great use of screen-share technology to sign documents. However, working in Jersey a week later, I realised I was now paying for roaming that had previously been free.
It took around 10 seconds on the website to find the option to complain, they phoned me the next day, and then sent an email confirming what they were going to do:
Easy to contact, a thorough explanation, and a fair resolution. Albeit I did feel a bit guilty about this one, as the agent was so brilliant, but now I worry he’ll be in trouble…
As I was writing this piece, another example was shared with me by James Hirst , regarding a faulty item of clothing from Passenger.
The response makes for great reading:
Easy to contact, a proper apology, a quick resolution. More than that though, they’ve also shown genuine care about being a sustainable business. Amazon is often held up as a great example of problem-solving for their quick ‘we’ll send you another one’ response, but I don’t recall them ever suggesting what you do with the faulty item you’ve received, or offering an easy way to return it.
When you’re running a business, things go wrong. Sometimes they’re avoidable, and sometimes they’re not, but in either case, what matters is how you deal with it. Customers can forgive the biggest of errors if you own it, explain it, and resolve it. It builds trust, certainty, a confidence that if something goes wrong in the future, the organisation will be there to pick up the pieces.
Petty squabbling back and forward, with multiple emails instead of one good phone call, simply makes the situation worse – as well as being far more expensive for the organisation.
And at the very least, offer a genuine, heartfelt apology. As this letter from Moss Bros in 1961 reminds us:
Thanks for reading this article, I really hope you enjoyed it. You can subscribe to my monthly newsletter above and find me?in tweet form?@johnjsills, in picture form on Instagram?@CX_Stories, or in work mode at?The Foundation
Great piece with a brilliant example of what great can look like that's nearing its 62nd birthday. There seems to be an especially wide gap between exceptional and rage-inducingly unfair and incompetent on this subject. It's also worth recognising that we can't see what's going on behind the scenes. Because ideally complaints are valuable to an organisation given customers are investing effort to tell you something's wrong and no doubt affecting many others who remain in silence too. If you're ever part of an organisation that's trying to reduce the number of complaints it gets, challenge the teams involved to adjust their aim and make it reducing customers' problems instead. This means you make complaining easier so you get better information, and then when you systematically work out the causes you can fix them and make a huge difference, to customers' experiences and to your costs of dealing with all the failure demand. And do this while following John's advice for how you deal with each of them too! This, like almost all customer-led initiatives, looks expensive in the short term but is of huge positive commercial value in the longer run.
NED I Board Advisor I Executive Coach for Customer Experience Leaders
2 年Couldn't agree more. Had a problem with Lufthansa last summer when they lost my bag for 6 days. They've only just paid up and have sent me the same email template no fewer than 6 times: "We realize that you have been waiting on our response to your claim for a significant amount of time and we would like to apologize for this delay. This certainly does not reflect the standard of service you rightly expect from us. ? In order to resolve your concern we would like to offer you a payment of xxx EUR, in the hope that this pragmatic solution contributes to a positive conclusion of your travel experience. Please note that this offer is without prejudice to the legal and factual situation." Another case study in how not to handle complaints.
Customer Experience professional
2 年My 89 year old dad's landline went down on Sunday. I contacted Nowtv on Twitter - they responded in 3 minutes with a number to call. I got straight through. The agant tested the line and found a fault. Told me they would send an engineer in next 72 hours but as he was elderly, mark it as urgent. The agent said he would call after 72 hours to check it had been actioned and escalate if necessary, as 'we can't have this for someone at this age'. The line was fixed 2 hours later...on a Sunday. The agent duly called 72 hours later to confirm.. impressive
Customer-centric excellence for housing associations, charities and consultants
2 年Great examples John. I hope with EE that rather than reprimand the agent they looked at how they train agents to ensure that key points of T&Cs are not glossed over. The frustrating thing about complaints is that you rarely get to find out what the organisation has done to learn from their mistakes - the key part.
Enabling Connections
2 年I've got a spare coat if anyone wants it....