Treasuring complaints

Why complaints are something to treasure

By Allison O’Neill

Complaints are a magnificent thing — if you are prepared to address them properly. They give you an amazing branding opportunity to really WOW your customer.

It is said an unhappy customer will tell 10 others about their bad experience whereas a happy customer will only tell one person. That alone is a good reason to sort your complaints systems.

If you don’t take the time to think about them, you may end up slung around the media for the wrong reasons.

A good example is ex-Virgin Blue employee Torsten Koerting who designed a board game using Virgin Blue branding. His version of snakes and ladders criticises his former employer’s decision-making process. It got huge worldwide media coverage and turned into a bit of a storm.

Now Virgin Atlantic has hit the spotlight. Passenger Oliver Beale found the in-flight food bizarre and gross so he wrote an hilarious letter to Richard Branson about it, complete with photos. “Imagine being a twelve-year-old boy, Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat there with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about. Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster, Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing.”

When media asked Richard Branson what he thought about it, he said “I read it and laughed my head off”. He had a great chat with Oliver Beale about it and asked him to help improve their food presentation.

Complaints to your business may not be as epic as these two Virgin stories, but they are just as important.

What mechanisms do you have in place to deal with complaints (big and small)?

It is something you need to seriously consider before it happens, not when it happens.

Some companies have fantastic, fast systems and really, really go all out for the customer (and so they should!), while others show a terrible attitude and argue with them telling them why they are wrong.

These sorts of places don’t feel the need to compensate the customer in any way.

That makes the complaint even more blood boiling for the customer — a defensive attitude from the company is a terrible way to react, and speaks volumes about their business.

Learn from these examples

What to do:

• “I complained about Cool Charm deodorant leaving white marks. I got sent six bottles as replacements in a variety of scents.”
• “A pizza we ordered from Hell Pizza was cold and gross. They had an instant attitude of sincere care. The company gave us a postcard for a free pizza. On the front it said ‘we won’t sweep it under the carpet’ and had a funny image of a lady sweeping. On the back it said “Hell – we stuffed up!” It was in keeping with their branding and used their name in a humorous way.”
• “A perfume I had went yellow and started leaking. Elizabeth Arden couriered a new perfume out fast.”

What not to do:

• “I bit into a ‘Pams’ lolly and there was this metal piece in it. I rang them and they didn’t really care. Just said “send it to us and we will look into it”. No apology, no freebies, no response to my letter accompanying the metal and bag. I was glad it was me and not a kid that ate that lolly!”
• “The photo shop kept ringing, demanding I come and pick up some prints I ordered.  When I managed to get in store they had lost half of my photos anyway. They barely apologised and said I would have to wait a month to get more. They were very rude about it. They phoned me 45 minutes later to tell me they found them, and demanded I come back and collect them.”
• “When checking out of a hotel I noticed a bag of mine was missing. It had some books and my Bible in it. Turns out the cleaners picked it up, ‘they thought it was rubbish’ and it was about to be binned. They didn’t seem to take the incident very seriously. That bible was absolutely irreplaceable and had it have been thrown away I would have really made them pay! I still don’t know why they were carelessly touching my belongings.”
• “I brought a dozen Lion Red beers and one bottle tasted off so I tipped it out and rang them. They wanted me to post the open beer to them. When I told them I’d tipped it out they said ‘can’t help you then’.”
• “We hired a bubble machine for a two-year-old’s birthday party but it didn’t work. I emailed them and they basically said ‘bad luck’. Because I had negotiated a price they were unable to offer a refund. I emailed back twice saying that discounted or not, a product has to be fit for purpose but they haven’t responded.”

Think about how your business deals with complaints at every level:

• How do you treat written complaints?
• How do you treat verbal complaints?
• Do you react faster when the customer has smoke coming out their ears and drag your feet when it’s a softly spoken woman who is complaining?
• Is your whole team up with how to handle any type of complaint? 
• Who has authority to compensate the customer?
• How can your complaint system be improved?
• What actions are you going to take/what policies will you change?

Allison O’Neill is the author of The Boss Benchmark — a book about how to be an amazing boss.

To download the first chapters free (and purchase a copy), go to www.thebossbenchmark.com

She blogs regularly on the topic at www.thebossbenchmark.blogspot.com or contact her at allison@thebossbenchmark.com

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