Wolf

I Love Complaints

Tom Wolf published this article on May 25, 2011 in Build your Business. Total Comments: 6 | Comment

As much as I would like to believe that Wolf is a perfect company, I know we are not.  I know we could do a much better job of providing products and services to our customers.  And the clearest reminder of this comes from the occasional customer complaint that crosses my desk.  I love these complaints and I appreciate the effort our customers expend to voice their concerns.

 These complaints not only remind us of our fallibility and our imperfections, but they also indicate what we might do to improve our service.  In addition, the way we handle these complaints can also indicate how seriously we take the concerns of our customers and how highly we value their business.  If we handle them right, complaints can help us become a better company.  They can also let our customers know that we really care about them.

 Customer complaints are a great source of useful information.  In some cases they let us know we’ve simply made a mistake with an order, screwed up on a delivery or a sold a product that didn’t live up to our customer’s expectations.  From time to time, they also let us know that the process we used wasn’t a very good one.  Either way, the complaint represents a chance to get better.  It forces us to take a fresh look at the things we do; the things that might have contributed to the problem; and the things we might do differently to prevent the problem from happening again.  As a result of these complaints we might augment our training program, change faulty processes or improve a product line.  Each and all of these things will make us better customer servants.  By enhancing our value proposition to the customer and by reducing rework they will also make us a more productive and more profitable company.  If we get to the root cause of a customer complaint, we can indeed get better.

 While customer complaints can tell us a lot about ourselves, they can also tell us a lot of good things about our customers.  They indicate that we have customers who care enough about our relationship to let us know that we can do a better job.  We can only profit from customer complaints if we have customers who are willing to share them with us.  It would be easy for a dissatisfied customer to show his or her displeasure by simply walking away.  In such a case, we would never know we had a problem.  We should therefore be grateful that some customers are willing to take the time to share their concerns with us.

 I know it takes time to make a complaint.  I also know it is often hard to take a complaint.  Most of us are defensive by nature.  I know I am.  As a result I do not always react constructively to complaints.  Sometimes I try to deny making a mistake (“Looks fine to me.”).  Sometimes I invoke forces beyond my control (“There was nothing I could have done.”).  Or sometimes I try to shift the blame (“It’s not my fault.”).  But as I have learned over the years, our customers really don’t care why something happened, who was to blame or how I felt about it.  They simply want to get it fixed.  So if we handle those complaints right, chances are we’ll become a better company.  It’s also likely that we’ll have a more loyal customer.  Handled right, customer complaints are good things.  And that is why I love them.