About the Author
Janelle Barlow, PhD, is probably more enamored about complaints than most because she has spent decades delving into the practical and positive aspects of treating complaints as gifts. She’s received critiques about her speeches and books from family, friends, readers, audiences, and clients for more than forty years and has benefited from them all! This is not to say that she doesn’t have moments when she complains poorly or receives a cutting piece of feedback that she struggles to deal with. But mostly, she has developed habits that allow her to learn from complaints.
Her experience as a consultant, executive coach, speaker, author, and media spokesperson has led to AComplaintIsAGift.com, a blended learning site and source of information and products about complaint handling. It is on this website that A Complaint Is a Gift Workbook, coauthored with Victoria Holtz, is located. She is currently president of Insight Associates doing business as JanelleBarlow.com, a partner with the multinational training and consulting groups MoveMinds Global, and a partner with Management Strategies-Asia. She teaches for the virtual faculty of the Holmes Institute in Colorado.
Janelle is the author and coauthor of several books, including Branded Customer Service, Emotional Value, Smart Videoconferencing, and previous editions of A Complaint Is A Gift, all published by Berrett-Koehler. Editor of the book Shift!, she also wrote The Stress Manager. She has created an online learning experience, Unbind Your Mind: Creativity, with the European-based company, UniNet. Unbind Your Mind has twelve accompanying Mind Flexors practice books.
The A Complaint Is a Gift concept has been adopted as the standard mindset by hundreds of organizations. Many of them are now working to make their organizations complaint-friendly by following Barlow’s service-recovery map. She has addressed associations and businesses in seventy-three countries. A few of her major A Complaint Is a Gift clients include AT&T, Butterfield Bank in Bermuda, Caribbean Airlines, Family Fare, Blue Chip Casino, Kaiser Permanente, MegaFon in Russia, Group Life Bank in Russia, Jumer’s Casino, Toyota Financial Services, Hualapai Tourism, and Air New Zealand. She has also worked with World Bank, Lennar Corporation, Jaguar Land Rover, Sberbank in Moscow, Ellison Technologies, Genting Resorts, Desert Diamond Entertainment Enterprises, Isle of Capri Casinos, Royal Plaza on Scotts (named Best Small Hotel in Singapore for seven years in a row), and Viking cruises, with whom she helped launch its award-winning Ocean ships and River longboats service platforms.
Her doctorate is from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied education and political science. She has a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s in psychology from Sonoma State University. Living and working in Taiwan for three years, she developed a keen sense of diversity, ideas, and management styles. She is married to Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove and has a son, Lewis Barlow.
She can be reached at [email protected] or JaBarlow@ alloutperform.com, and her websites are JanelleBarlow.com and AComplaintIsAGift.com.