A contact of mine came to me with an interesting problem the other day. His business was looking to establish a performance target for complaints within each division, and planned to set a target based on number of complaints. He, quite rightly, felt that this is an inappropriate measure and would prefer something about resolution or satisfaction.
Why is number of complaints the wrong measure? Partly because the raw number tells you very little – you would need to factor in the number of opportunities for error (in other words larger divisions are likely to generate more complaints). More importantly, this tends to create a culture that discourages staff from registering complaints. In other words this takes us back to the “bad old days” (still very much with us) in which complaints are not seen as a gift.
In some ways this is just like the crime statistics quoted by the government – if they go down then there’s less crime, if they go up then we’re getting better at reporting. It could well be argued (in fact I have argued) that registering more complaints is often a good thing, but perhaps we need to find a different form of words. Encourage staff to register any expression of dissatisfaction, but don’t call it a complaint…call it an idea for improvement.
And how do you measure performace? Asking customers whether they feel their complaints have been resolved is a good idea (and can very rarely do any harm). Conducting a survey of complainants to see how satisfied they were with the experience is even better – a key part of an effective suite of event-driven surveys that judge your ability to deliver at the moments of truth.
Tags: Complaints, Targets
