Stop merely managing complaints and start recovering relationships

Complaints are probably the most obvious and dreaded statements a customer can make to voice his dissatisfaction with a company. However, why do so many companies struggle to get those (often very public) issues resolved? Why is it so hard to get the ever increasing waves of escalation and media exposure under control?

Organizations often see complaints as cases with a reference number to be worked on, instead of seeing the customer experience behind it. Complaining customers represent probably the most loyal customers a company could ever have and as such deserve a vastly different approach than offered by most companies today. This might sound counterintuitive, but a customer who complains, wants to continue to work with the company, otherwise why bother and try to initiate a change? Disengaged customers leave without providing this vital feedback and are usually lost forever.  Worse, they tell everyone else about it on the way out. But turning the perception of a complaining customer around will often trigger a lifelong open loyalty and reverse potentially negative word of mouth into true brand ambassadorship.

Do not get me wrong here, organizations still need to identify and fix the underlying issues that caused the complaints. They still need to try to manage and recover the perception of those who leave. However, approaching complaining customers with a Relationship Recovery approach, rather than merely managing the grievance, will have a much stronger, positive impact.

In one of my previous assignments for a client on revamping Complaints Management Processes into a Recognized Market Leading Approach, we encountered a complaint that exemplifies this approach rather nicely. A father informed us that his 4 year old child had been rather rudely called to be quiet by one of the staff. This happened while waiting in line for the organization’s service and the child used the time to practice singing and cheering while painting on one of the forms available in the lobby.

Overall the organization failed at many levels here:

• To provide timely service (widely promised to customers and regularly measured as KPI)
• It exposed the staff to extreme stress (due to earlier cost measures that resulted in lower staff levels) and ultimately had one of its staff yell at a child.
• It misinterpreted the policy of preferential treatment to people with special needs (and yes I believe parents with young children deserve the same preference than someone in a wheelchair)
• And on top of all the employees and supervisors were not able to provide immediate resolution or escalation to the situation.

The learning that could be taken out of such a “simple” example were manifold - if one would just care to listen and analyze what happened from a customer perception point of view - and include at the very least:

• Provide preferential queuing systems for all that need special treatments, not only the ones defined by law or common sense
• Recognize stress levels in employees that could trigger behaviors otherwise unlikely or out of character and counter them appropriately before impacts happen - even if this means to increase staff levels during peak times or send them on breaks if they seem to become “edgy”
• Identify where the breakdown of escalations happened. Many complaints are never treated as such, just because the staff at the customer touch points did not know how to identify them, and how and where to escalate them to for proper attention.

Any decently run complaint management system could pick up on the above. But what makes a relationship recovery process special is the way this case was handled on the customer perception side.

Here is what we did representing a relationship recovery approach:

• As the one who was really affected was the 4 year old child, a recovery of his negative experience was attempted by sending an apology letter addressed to the child, including a voucher for a local children arts and crafts school reflecting his love of painting etc.
• The parent was invited to join a focus group on how to possibly improve the outlet experience for parents with young children. This was used to better understand this customer group and their specific needs.
• The parent was also asked to provide future feedback as a mystery shopper.

Within a very short time the customer turned into a strong brand ambassador and this story was probably more shared among this highly networked customer target group than any managed social media efforts of the company could have ever achieved.

Understanding your customer and the power of experience and relationship recovery could truly improve our day to day life. Hopefully more companies will not only start treating complaints in the best possible manner, but attempt to resolve the underlying issues in a more customer focused approach.

Did you experience truly customer focused reactions to complaints (not the negative ones, the blogs and social media are full of them and we should rather learn from positive examples)? We would love to hear your happy endings.

Marc Karschies is Managing Partner at "Karschies, Ceron & Alred Consultants" (KCA Consultants), a boutique Customer Experience and Service Quality Management consultancy and training company in Dubai.
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