A Complaint Is a Gift, 3rd Edition: How to Learn from Critical Feedback and Recover Customer Loyalty - Softcover

Barlow, Janelle

 
9781523002931: A Complaint Is a Gift, 3rd Edition: How to Learn from Critical Feedback and Recover Customer Loyalty
Softcover
ISBN 10: 152300293X ISBN 13: 9781523002931
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The third edition of this bestseller (over 275,000 copies sold) builds on the tested formula that helps organizations recognize the value of complaints using updated examples and concepts in the age of COVID-19.

The first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift introduced the revolutionary notion that customer complaints are not annoyances to be dodged, denied, or buried but are instead valuable pieces of feedback—not to mention your best bargain in market research. Complaints provide a feedback mechanism that can help organizations rapidly and inexpensively strengthen products, service style, and market focus. Most importantly, complaints that are well received create customer loyalty.

This new edition condenses the tried and true eight-step formula into a tighter, more efficient three-step formula. From her work with clients, the author has updated industry-specific complaint examples and added in new concepts, such as a process that enables employees to handle complaints with increased emotional resilience—something that is sorely needed since dealing with increasingly difficult customers is a common occurrence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Handling complaints doesn’t have to be a negative, soul-crushing experience. Janelle Barlow gives the right tools to treat each of them as a source of innovative ideas that can transform your business.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Janelle Barlow is president and owner of All Out Performance and has decades of experience as a consultant, executive coach, speaker, and author. Her past clients include World Bank Group, HP, and DHL. She has served as president for the Global Speakers Federation and the National Speakers Association chapters in both Northern California and New Mexico, and she is a partner with the multinational training and consulting group MoveMinds. Barlow’s numerous awards include the Legend of the Speaking Industry, CSP from the National Speakers Association, and Consultant of the Year from both TMI International and TACK International. She is the bestselling author of A Complaint Is a Gift (over 275,000 copies sold).

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The Customer Speaks

It has been over ten years since the first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift was published. It’s embarrassing to admit that we naively believed poorly handled complaints would be a thing of the past as a result of the widespread distribution the original edition enjoyed. We heard a number of “wow” examples, such as a medical supply company in Kiev, Ukraine, that completely reorganized its approach to complaint handling based solely on the contents of the Russian-translated version. With examples like this from around the world, we assumed we’d soon be able to stop talking about complaints—even though we would miss that. Complaints are a fun topic for speeches. Stories about poorly handled complaints arouse a great deal of eye rolling and tongue clucking. We thought everyone would have understood that complaints are gifts.

It didn’t happen. In a 2006 survey of 3,200 U.S. and European consumers, 86 percent of respondents said their “trust in corporations has declined in the past five years.”1 In 2007, RightNow Technologies reported that after suffering a negative service experience,


80 percent of U.S. adults decided to never go back to that company
74 percent registered a complaint or told others
47 percent swore or shouted
29 percent reported they got a headache, felt their chest tighten, or cried
13 percent fought back by posting a negative online review or blog comment2

2
Finally, a Gallup poll commissioned by the Better Business Bureau, conducted between August 22 and September 8, 2007, found that 18 percent of adult Americans said their trust in business had dropped in the last year. Yet 93 percent of those surveyed said a company’s reputation for honesty and fairness is extremely important to them. The report concludes that if companies don’t deliver what they promise (the source of most complaints), customers will go somewhere else.3 It’s not a pretty picture.

While the ideas from this book have influenced a great many people, companies still get things wrong, and customers continue to complain— if we’re lucky. Service providers too often either blame customers for the mistakes they complain about or make them prove their positions. In many cases, they take so long to respond that customers forget what they complained about when they finally hear back from organizations. Customers frequently are forced to talk with robotic electronic voice systems that feebly attempt to replicate real conversations, and unfortunately, in some cases, these exchanges are better than live human interactions. And we won’t even cite the statistics for how long customers wait on telephones to talk with someone. When they finally are connected with a live person, it’s often someone living halfway around the world who reads from a script. Many customers become so frustrated with this type of communication that by the time they get to talk with someone, they start out angry and are automatically labeled problem customers—even though they may have been trying to buy something or have a simple question answered.

The deck is stacked against businesses trying to satisfy their customers. Customers expect satisfactory service. As a result, unsatisfactory service stands out. Because it stands out, it is more likely to be remembered and weighed more heavily compared to everything that went right. Ten transactions can go right, but that one mistake is what grabs consumer attention. This reality demands that we focus on what we can learn from customers who aren’t happy.4

Organizations, however, don’t seem to learn from their customers, as witnessed by the fact that most consumers face repeats of the very problems they already complained about. Most importantly, many service providers still see complaints as something to be avoided, as indicated by the fact that many organizations continue to pay bonuses to their managers based on reductions in complaints. Yet surveys conducted around the world demonstrate over and over again that companies with the best-rated service in their industry are the most profitable. It’s really that simple. And complaint handling is an integral part of that service rating.3

It is true that many people and organizations have learned how to handle complaints better. Several large companies have instituted sophisticated technological approaches to more efficiently respond to complaints. And many companies educate their staff in the best ways to respond to upset customers. But every year, a new group of service providers show up to work in organizations around the world—fresh representatives who haven’t had the advantage of the training offered by their employers. (Given the high rate at which call-center staff leave their jobs, they probably wouldn’t have much use for that knowledge in any case.) Every year, new types of complaints are presented by consumers. Eager and desperate managers somehow continue to delude themselves into thinking that the best tactic is to eliminate all the problems that create complaints, as if zero defects is actually attainable. And today, twelve years since A Complaint Is a Gift hit the bookshelves, more and more complaints are made public on the Internet, posted in vitriolic tones by dissatisfied customers.

Because of what customers are forced to endure, many call-center staff regularly have to serve unpleasant, upset customers whom they personally did nothing to create. Yet to be good service providers, they must be able to calm these customers down and deal with them in a way that makes them want to return to do business again at some time in the future. Unfortunately, many staff take customer bad behavior just as personally as customers take the bad service they have been offered, and staff defensive reactions leak out onto customers.

Is it any wonder that most call centers have such a difficult time holding on to staff unless they offer the best-paying jobs in the area? This rapid and regular loss of staff requires constant hiring of new, untrained staff. As a result, many call centers do not have staff who know how to effectively handle complaints, let alone understand that a complaint is being delivered unless it is spelled out with the precise words “I have a complaint.”4

Academic research on complaint handling hasn’t revealed earth-shaking new information since we surveyed studies for the original book. Greater and greater refinement, however, of what happens in the complaint process has been achieved over the past ten years. For example, more research has been conducted on differences of complaining styles between different national groups.5 This more detailed knowledge about consumer behavior has opened up additional areas to be researched. Here’s our conclusion after reading hundreds of research studies:


The more we know about service recovery, the more complex our understanding becomes.
The more we know, the more we need to know to get the results we want with service recovery.
The more we know, the more we need to experiment to see what works in specific situations.
While specific data may have changed, the research conducted in the 1960s through the 1990s has, more or less, held into the 2000s. No complaints there! In fact, it would be scary to think that a completely new understanding about complaints has popped up, necessitating an entirely new approach to complaint handling. Bottom line: the concept that a complaint is a gift holds true today as much as it did over ten years ago. Complaints are never going to go away, and organizations and their staffs need to adopt a strategy that enables them to recover customer loyalty when things go wrong.


What’s Changed

What has...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
152300293X
ISBN 13 
9781523002931
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
3
Anzahl der Seiten
224
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland

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