Your Complaining Customers are Sending You a Very Positive Message

Unfortunately for many organizations, at any given time 25 percent of their customers are dissatisfied enough to consider switching to the competition.  Worse yet, only 1 percent will notify the organization before leaving.

Although none of us enjoy receiving a complaint, a customer's complaint is a gift. As opposed to an upset customer who silently switches to your competitor, a complaining customer is telling you that they:

• care
• think you care
• think you have the potential to do better
• want to continue the relationship with you

 Your & my customers spend money for:

• solutions to their problems
• positive feelings regarding interactions us

And they feel they have bought the right to complain - letting us know how they feel.

When companies make it easy to complain, complaining customers become company assets giving the organization opportunities to improve & excel over their competition. Complaint handling or recovery is a strategic method for increasing profits by:

• enhancing customer loyalty
• obtaining customer feedback in order to implement continuous improvements.

 Excellence in customer satisfaction requires an effective recovery program because:

• few businesses can afford to lose customers
• effective recovery enhances customers' perceptions of the organization's competence & the quality of its products & services
• effective recovery can create a stronger relationship with a customer than if the problem had not occurred

Due to the nature of their business - such as technology solutions providers - The Focus Group has assisted some organizations in designing their entire customer service programs around their response to service or product failures.

An effective way to convey the significance of recovery to the employees in your organization is by communicating the value of your typical customer because it:

• illustrates the profit increase from a reduction in the loss of customers
• puts the cost of customer requests in perspective
• demonstrates how developing a recovery program is an investment
• gets the attention of anyone concerned with the financial future of your organization

• multiplying your profit margin by the amount a typical customer spends with your organization in a year
• multiplying that amount by the number of years a customer continues to do business with you

Then adding:

• the amount by which a customer increases orders each year
• the amount your costs decrease each year a customer stays with you
• the value of referrals from this customer

This customer value may be significantly more than you might have anticipated.

Developing an organizational culture committed to & effective at recovery necessitates being effective at three steps:

• awareness: conducting customer satisfaction surveys to identify your customers' needs & expectations - to include during their recovery experiences
• resolution: training your employees to manage complaints through pre-planned recovery standards of performance
• improvement: conducting root-cause analysis & implementing preventive steps; utilizing your recovery experiences to continuously improve your customers' experiences

 Two recovery givens that we can all agree on are:

• product/service defects followed by customer complaints are inevitable - therefore it's only logical to prepare for these inevitabilities
• effective recovery requires organization-wide preparation - it will not occur without it