Small Business Boomers

Customer complaints are golden

by jim on December 1st, 2006

Hard to believe, that the person complaining to you about your product or service is the best thing that can happened to you. Facing a client who is upset with your business is difficult. Because it is your business it can be doubly upsetting because you will probably take it personally. That is great. When they are done remember to say thank you. And, mean it.

Complaints are gold because you get so few of them. Studies reveal that only 1 in 10 customers who want to complain do. On the Internet it’s 1 in 100. There is a big difference between the people who complain and those who don’t. That difference is that those who say something about the short comings of your product or service want you to do better. The others want you to fail.

People who don’t complain to you will complain to their friends, family and total strangers. They will not give you a chance to fix the problem that they see. They destroy your reputation and you don’t have a chance to respond. They are out to get you. It happens at all levels.

Back in the late ‘70’s I worked with a large international company and we had a client who was also a large international company. Well one weekend a low level clerk exceeded her authority and messed up our client. The damage control effort was massive and the client’s people smiled. Unknown to us a senior vice-president of our client’s had told his people to replace us, but never tell us on pain of immediate termination. One day, about a year later, a letter arrived in the mail from their lawyer informing us that our contract would not be renewed. They had replaced us with a competitor and we never had a clue. It wasn’t my account.

I know for a fact that our executives would have given that client anything they wanted to keep the relationship, but not only did the client decided not to do business with us any more they wanted to screw us. They were a dream to deal with that last year, but we didn’t learn anything that we could do to save their business. Their complaints would have given us information we might have used to save the relationship.When you throw on top the fact that it is 1,000 times more expensive to get a new client than to keep an existing one our loss is even more devastating.

The big lesson here is that if someone complains to you treat it like the gift it is. How do you handle it?