Complaints Are Opportunities

It is said that 91% of people don’t complain. They prefer to obtain their revenge by not buying from a business that has given them an inferior product or a poor service.

They have a passive power and they know it!

The following is a true story – only the name of the business has been changed.

Blooming Buds was a well established garden centre on the outskirts of a growing town. Two years before it closed it had expanded to include a café, a gift shop and an organic fruit and vegetable outlet. As well as employing a core staff of ten it took on a number of seasonal and part-time staff. The company didn’t have a customer service policy nor did it believe in wasting money on training. Customers seemed happy enough. After all they hardly got any complaints. No ‘everything in the garden was rosy’.

The manager should have been a bit suspicious. No complaints doesn’t mean that all customers are happy.

Most of us don’t bother complaining. We just walk away and don’t go back.

The expansion, unsurprisingly, led to a variety of organisational and logistical problems. There were staffing shortages, managerial inexperience, reduction in quality etc. Gradually business dropped off but still, nothing was done about it.

The staff stopped telling the manager about some of the problems they had encountered because he wouldn’t listen. He invested heavily on advertising, and making sizeable capital changes. He never once thought of getting some feedback from the customers. Eventually the inevitable happened. The business had to close.

Complaints Are Opportunities:

Opportunities to do what?

• Evaluate how well you are doing
• Identify weak points in your system and processes and put them right
• See situations from the customer’s point of view
• Improve customer satisfaction
• Create long-term loyalty – handling disgruntled customers well often leaves them feeling more positive about your organisation than before.

Just nine days to launch! The excitement is mounting.