In my last blog post, I shared thoughts on complaint journeys, mindset, and why complaints can be such a valuable source of insight for a business - if you’re open to really listening.
Now, here’s where things get even more intriguing. Sometimes, the initial problem turns out not to be the main issue. The way it’s handled is.
How you handle that moment can make or break your relationship with that customer forever - and of course who they share their experience with: friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, gym buddies, heck even the checkout person at Asda!
Somewhere along the line, complaints became a dirty word.
Something to avoid, deflect, rebrand. But customers don’t stop complaining because you don’t call it that. They just stop trusting you.
If someone is taking the time to complain, they still care.
Let me share a personal experience. I won’t name the company, but for the purposes of this blog let’s call them “McDowell’s”.
A completely avoidable interaction escalated purely because of how it was handled. Not because the issue was huge, it was totally complaint worthy, but it was amplified far further because the response was poor - and that wasn’t an individual failure, it was top-down.
I was told by the restaurant manager that ‘we don’t have a complaint process’ - say what??? You, McDowell’s, doesn’t have a complaint process - are you sure?
Turns out there was a little bit of truth to that statement. Within 8 hours of the incident, I sent the CEO an email with my complaint.
“The artist formerly known as Complaints”
It was passed to a “Guest Services Team”. Now, is that a jazzy rebrand of a complaints team, or are we so uncomfortable with the word complaint that we’ve tried to rename it out of existence?
Worse though, there was no real investigation. No real desire to hear what I was saying. Just a desire to manage the issues I’d raised to a closed state. It was about managing an internal process, rather than trying to listen and then learn.
Because, from a customer’s point of view, if I can’t see a clear, dedicated complaints function, my immediate thought is that this company doesn’t want to hear what I think, or won’t know how to handle my concern, and that chips away at trust before the conversation has even started.
A dedicated complaints team isn’t about negativity. It’s about competence. It says we expect things to go wrong sometimes, we’re not afraid to hear about it, and we’re confident we can fix them.
The missed opportunity
Here’s the counter-intuitive truth. A well-handled complaint can turn a dissatisfied customer into a stronger advocate than someone who never had a problem at all. Trust isn’t built on perfection. It’s built on how you show up when things aren’t perfect.
Complaints can make or break a business - just not in the way most people think. You can have the shiniest, best product in the land and still slowly erode trust if your complaints processes and handling is anything below excellent.
Because every complaint is a little nugget of gold. And what you do with it says everything about your business and how much you actually care.
Welcome them. Own them. Learn from them. Do what your competitors are too scared to do.
