I recently attended a roundtable event where Jo Leckie, Principal Consultant at Big Picture Training, started the conversation with some stats:-
- 96% of customers who receive poor service won’t complain
- For every customer complaint, there are 26 unhappy customers who remain silent.
It sparked a great debate around complaints and hearing the voice of those who won’t, don’t or can’t complain.
So why don’t people complain?
- It’s too complicated
- They fear retaliation
- They don’t you to have a negative view of them
- They don’t think it will make a difference
- The complained once before and their experience of complaining was worse than the original problem
If we take these reasons its easy to see why people don’t complain.
How do we hear the voices of those that don’t tell us how it was for them? How do you know that the services you provide were as good as you expected them to be?
There are many things we can do – look at data for example – if there is damp and mould in one flat in a block there could be a fair chance there the same situation in other flats and those customers haven’t let you know. Be proactive go and visit, talk to them and offer solutions and communicate what can be done. Imagine the relief that customer would feel.
But what about that statistic that says 26 people don’t complain for every one person that does?
In many sectors we talk about learning from complaints and often will look at what went wrong so that we can prevent it happening again in the future – brilliant, but those customers still have experienced a poor service and that can damage their relationship and trust with that organisation. Did you find out who they were? Your records will help you identify them and once you identify them did you contact them and resolve their complaint?
The key to really hearing the hidden voices of customers is genuinely learning from what you already know – if it’s gone wrong once chances are it’s gone wrong on other occasions for other people.
Imagine contacting those 26 people and saying you know they used your service and that you are aware that it wasn’t the level of service they should have had from the organisation. Find out how it was for them, apologise, you know it wasn’t the service you wanted to give, and agree with the customer a plan to resolve their issue.
How would that experience feel for that customer? What level of trust would that instil between the customer and the organisation? And how likely is that customer to tell you in the future if something is wrong so that you can be better and provide services that customers want.
Pro-active complaint management and genuine learning, go looking for the complaint and put it right and make the long-term changes to prevent it happening again.
Author: Sian Humphreys – Lead Associate UK, Big Picture Training & Learning Design