Why we should love customer complaints and reward them!

It seems a bit strange to state that we love customer complaints. How else will you ever know what your customers want and you are not providing? We can ask them to do surveys all day long and hope they spend their valuable time doing them and even reward them with some office trinkets or even discounts for your product or service for doing so. How about rewarding them when they complain? Now wouldn’t that be different? What…reward your customers to complain…you must be joking….I can hear someone saying that right now.

In today’s world of social media, a business has to consider 2 avenues for negative comments or complaints. Complaints posted on social media don’t always serve a company well and might be considered unreliable whereas complaints provided to the company via automated form systems or company staff should be taken more seriously. It will take practice and judgement to determine the difference in the two sources. As an example, when I am looking for recommendations for a new service or product, I look at the negative reviews first. I feel they would give me more usable information than the positive reviews. After all, if a customer is satisfied with the product or service, what is to be gained with a positive review? A negative review lets them express some specific reasons they are complaining about or not satisfied with. However, negative comments on social media tend to be random, emotional complaints that may not provide any direct, specific information that helps you address the problem. They can also be posted anonymously. It seems more of a way for customers to vent about their dissatisfaction though we have found some companies truly recognize negative complaints on the social media pages and will react quickly to help quell the future comments from continuing the negative complaint reactions.

If you want your customer to appreciate the service or products you sell them, you have to coach and reward them to help you achieve that. So why would you coach your customer to complain? The quickest way to get feedback is to ask people what they want or need that they are not getting. Heck, everyone can tell you that they get great service or are enjoying an excellent product. That’s so easy! But people are often afraid of expressing dissatisfaction over anything when dealing with the company directly. They fear retribution or even worse, revenge. I believe that businesses have been treating customers like this for far too long. We make customers feel like we can treat them any way we want and they will still give us their money for poor service or a low quality product….and customers have become complacent in their reaction to poor treatment. As an example, they often stay with a poor service provider because they do not want to spend time shopping around or when they just feel like they are getting an acceptable price for that service.

There are some industries that are notorious for this behavior. Insurance companies, home and auto, have enjoyed making the shopping action of the customer difficult but we have recently seen this change with the advent of online websites that encourage price matching and active comparison shopping by customers. We have also seen this with hard wired home security providers who charge high termination fees to end contracts. This too is changing with the introduction of wireless security products with DIY installations and simple service initiation plans that also provide better prices and higher quality products. The days of making the customer a high priority are upon us!

So when your customer complains about your service or product what do you do? Are you actively encouraging feedback? Are you proactively inquiring about complaints they may be contemplating and asking themselves “should I change my provider”? Do you ask them outright “what complaints do you have about the service we provide or the products you use”?

Oh my, who would dare ask your customer that question to only get REAL feedback? I propose that is exactly what we should be doing. Don’t ask your customer what they like. Encourage them to be honest and share their REAL feelings and reward that action. Tell them up front that you want to send them a reward, maybe a gift card of their choice, for helping you improve their experience with your company.

Would you rather lose a customer or hear them complain? So you might think this applies to small sales or transactional business. Do you want your customers to be an advocate for you? Do you want them to shout from the rooftops that they love your service or your product? How do you expect a customer to do that if you don’t listen to their complaints? Are customer referrals and success stories relevant to your sales organization? I hope so! If you want your customers to be your biggest advocates and help you win more business and develop strong partnering relationships, then you better open every ear in your company to your customer’s complaints.

Every ear? What does that mean? Everyone person in your company should be focused on customer care and success. They should be asking how else they can help the customer with concerns or problems. Yes…asking them. The next generation of customer focused operations is training every employee on how to make the customer KING! Listen to the customer and be proactive about their complaints and issues. Every employee should represent the company as being a customer focused organization and TRULY involved in building customer loyalty and asking what they can do to provide the best service or highest quality product possible!

So is every complaint you get worth considering? Do some customers just complain to get attention? Is every complaint a problem you have to fix? No! There is never a complaint that you should ignore or not give credence to. To have a customer raise an issue enough to consider it a complaint should be the only criteria you need to “listen” to your customer. As part of your business operations, you should have a process to handle complaints in a formal manner so they go through the appropriate steps to properly assess and manage them. Some businesses will have much more formally defined steps for deep analysis and proper resolution. Others may find their process to be simpler yet still managing the complaint in a way that proper analysis is performed to determine the next steps. Based on your analysis, the resolution of how to handle the complaint can vary. Correct it now, correct it later, make it a feature request and prioritize for future improvement or assign it to a person who can follow up with the customer to get more details in order to properly handle it.

Yes there are customers who complain to get attention…but does that tell you something about the customer’s behavior or their business culture, or even about the specific individual that is complaining? It should and it is certainly important to recognize. If you track complaints submitted, you should be able to report against that data. By analyzing the data, you can determine trends and patterns in repeat “complainers” by individuals and by companies. This is an ideal way to document this in the customer’s profile and provide your customer support staff the background to be sure that incidents from these customers and individual are handled appropriately. They may need extra attention and “handled with care” to ensure you are being sensitive to the complaints but to also recognize and build rapport with those individuals and or companies that are the “squeaky wheel”. Reaching out to these high ranking “complainers” could begin a new relationship that could result in previously unrecognized benefits…or you might determine they will always be a “squeaky wheel”!

To wrap up, complaints are valuable and should be recognized as a customer who wants to communicate with you but isn’t sure of the most appropriate way so they choose the most common and comfortable route. It is up to each organization to determine the best way to handle complaints and adopt techniques that are perhaps new and unique and that all employees can adapt. Use rewards as a mechanism that customers may be surprised to be offered and will help you develop a “partnership” relationship. Finally, transform your organization to be focused on the next generation of customer-centric strategic decision making. The future of improved customer care and building loyal relationships is upon us!