Complaining customers are great for business

Understanding and knowing your customers is good business sense. And the first step towards developing a better understanding of your customers is to encourage your employees to be receptive to feedback, both the good and the bad.

This is especially true in today’s context where most of us are constantly connected to numerous online social network platforms, and the negative impact of any perceived mishandling by businesses has the potential, albeit small, of being amplified online.

Despite this, in many companies, there is typically considerable negativity surrounding customer complaints. Businesses should remove this negativity and instead develop a company culture that welcomes feedback and puts the focus on handling that feedback well.

This will encourage customer feedback to flow up through the organisation, translating previously tacit knowledge residing in your frontline staff into institutional knowledge that has the potential to improve the experience of not only your customers but your employees as well.

Without this culture in place, you may find your staff having a tendency to suppress complaints. A major consequence of this non-reporting of complaints is that your decision makers would be deprived of any useful business intelligence that could have been embedded in individual complaints.

So, if the number of complaints is currently a key performance indicator (KPI) that you measure your staff against, as is typical for most companies, please consider removing it and instead consider replacing it with a complaint handling metric.

Doing this signals two things to your staff. First, it signals your belief that your staff have no direct control over whether any customer complains, so it is reasonable that they should not be measured against it.

Second, it signals that what they have direct control over is how well they handle each complaint. I believe that replacing this negative KPI of the number of complaints with a positive KPI of complaint handling and communicating the rationale behind the change is an important part of any long term strategy to raise and sustain customer satisfaction and profits.

Beyond handling customer feedback and complaints well, businesses should take it one step further and consider being proactive in engaging and connecting with your customers.

Harness online communication platforms such as web chats, blogs, Facebook or Twitter, as effective customer relationship channels. A continuous and attentive engagement with your customers, both online and off, complaining or otherwise, will give invaluable insights into being able to satisfy their needs by keeping track of their ever changing expectations of your business.

Remember that the effectiveness of the Internet in amplifying the reach of a single voice works as well for businesses as it does for individual consumers.