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.

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.

The UKCSI is a national measure of customer satisfaction that we conduct for the Institute of Customer Service, and is a great way of analysing broad trends across the UK consumer landscape. We can dive into the results for indivdiual sectors and organisations, but it’s interesting to establish some broad averages for the UK as a whole. Each set of results is based on 26,000 reponses, so the findings are pretty robust.

12% of customers say that they have had a problem with their supplier in the last year, and 75% of those told a member of staff about their problem (whether it was logged as a complaint is another question!).

It’s interesting that 25% of customers still don’t give organisations the chance to fix their problem, despite all that we say nowadays about “a complaint is a gift” and so on. Why didn’t they?

Contrary to popular belief, only 11% of non-complainers put it down to their (stereotypically British?) dislike of complaining. Depressingly, 50% of customers don’t tell anyone about their problem because they don’t believe there’s any point. Many customers know from bitter experience that complaining doesn’t get you anywhere, except in certain sectors or if you can get it escalated to the gods.

The next three answers all point to a cumbersome complaints process, and so does “didn’t know how to”—complaining is seen as time-consuming, confusing, and difficult—all in all 47% of customers said that at least one of these things put them off complaining (this is a mutiple response question, so the total if you just add up the responses comes to more than that).

The cold, hard, fact is that, despite everything British organisations say about complaint handling, 25% of customers with a problem don’t complain. Why? Mostly because they don’t think anything will happen, or because the complaints process does not encourage complaints.

Looks like bad news for bt:

Customers seem to have a crisis of confidence about their tendency to whinge…except when it comes to shoes.

Actually I was so intrigued by the shoes one that I had to Google it. It turns out to be a proverb – “I complained I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet”.

“Customer is” turned up both “always right” and “not always right”, so I decided to let Googlefight settle it once and for all. Looks like an easy win for “not”:

Which annoys me slightly, to be honest. Of course customers are not always right, but you can’t win an argument with a customer.

You have to let go of your ego, and the natural tendency to be defensive,  if you want to handle irate customers well.

Much of the time you’ll find that, even if the customer was wrong, their mistake is understandable…i.e. your fault after all. Too many organisations have lousy processes which inevitably lead customers into trouble, and then react to a complaint by saying (not necessarily in so many words) “We’re sorry you’re too stupid to use our product”. Not an apology.

Start by assuming that the customer is a reasonable person, that the problem is your fault, and that a pleasant outcome is possible if you handle the situation well. Most of the time you’ll be proved right.

Most organisations put a lot of effort into their complaint handling process, but much of this effort is misdirected. We’re going to focus on how companies can use surveys and other data to improve the complaint handling process.

From the customer’s perspective, a complaint is a test of their supplier’s integrity. Get it right and you can win a customer for life; get it wrong and you’ll have an active antagonist warning their friends against you.

What makes a good complaints experience? It breaks down into three areas, more or less equally important, which we’ll look at in more detail over the coming weeks and months:

• The outcome of the complaint
• The complaints process
• The soft skills of your staff