A complaints survey, like any survey, needs to know what it’s for. This is not as simple as it might sound, and sometimes competing needs may pull the survey in different directions. Decide what you want from the survey, and then start thinking about what’s possible.
In the case of complaints surveys, the problem is often that organisations want to measure their complaints process, which is something customers don’t care about in the slightest (any more than they care about your delivery process). What you need to realise is that, as far as customers are concerned:
- The outcome is part of the process. Actually that’s not quite right—what I mean is that the outome is partly how they judge the process. If you didn’t come to a fair decision (in their eyes) then it can’t be a fair process.
- The complaints process starts with the first point of contact. This is the hardest bit for many organisations. You simply cannot use a complaints survey as a measure of the complaint team’s performance. As a rule complaint teams are very good, and complaints surveys will tell you that companies are pretty bad. Why the gap? Because getting into the complaints process is so painful for customers.
You need to run a complaints survey in order to understand the experience you’re creating for customers. Designing the questionnaire carefully allows you to unpick some specifics about how customers feel about the complaints team, the outcome they received, and the handling…but never imagine you can completely divorce these things in the customer’s mind.
In fact, you should embrace the fact that a complaints survey gives you this confused mess of customer feedback in all its woolly glory—the art of surveying customers is to act as a translator between what customers think and feel and what the business does to create this. Don’t expect customers to do your work for you.
