CHAPTER TWO

How We Tell Customers Not to Complain

The 2020 National Customer Rage Study showed a jump in complaints of 34 percent as compared to the benchmark 1976 White House study. Does this mean customers are complaining more, or do they face more service failures and just don’t report them? John Goodman, the driving force behind many major complaint studies, said complaints about problems are declining, even when serious problems are faced. Goodman believes this is due to trained hopelessness: “The customer has been trained by the system to accept problems as a general business practice—with the prospect of no change, why bother complaining?”¹

How Complaint Handlers Discourage Customer Complaints

Unfortunately, most people don’t like complaints, and they put up strong psychological blocks to hearing them. Even more dangerous for business, customers understand that most CSRs don’t want to hear what they have to say.

Complaint handling that discourages customers from speaking up includes all or some of the following reactions. Ask yourself how many of these responses you have faced and how they would make you feel:

Unfeeling apologies with no action—A customer walks into a dry cleaner and accidentally leans against a freshly painted wall not clearly marked, leaving a paint smear on her coat. The staff says sorry but makes no attempt to remedy the situation. Given this is a dry cleaner, the solution is quite obvious.

“There’s nothing I can do”—This rejection usually starts with an apology. “Sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.” If the customer protests, they hear, “Look, I said there was nothing I can do. Now could you please wait over there so I can help the next customer?”

Blaming treatment—Hapless customers can be blamed in so many ways: “You must have handled it wrong,” “You should have complained earlier,” “You violated the guarantee,” or “You didn’t send the guarantee card in.”

Slow treatment—The service rep says she will correct a mistake in a timely manner but does not, even in sharp contrast to the company’s advertisements.

No reaction—Company representatives do not return telephone calls or respond to written complaints. Customers are forced to call back several times, each time being told they will be helped, and yet nothing happens.

Brusque unfriendliness—Basic politeness goes out the window. A service provider looks at his watch to see what time it is. If his phone rings, he picks it up and begins taking what is obviously a personal call.

Insulting treatment—In extreme cases, customers are made to feel like criminals or liars: “No other customer has complained about that.” This does not mean someone has not felt like complaining; it just means no one has complained yet.

“You’ll have to go someplace else”—There’s always somewhere else a customer can be sent to: “I can’t help you. You have to go upstairs and talk to someone else,” “Write your comments down and send them to another department,” or “We are just the distributor— you’ll have to contact the manufacturer.”

“I’m not responsible”—Customers buy with the understanding that someone will take responsibility if they encounter an issue, but they hear, “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t my fault,” “I’d like to help you, but I don’t handle this,” “I just work here—I don’t make the rules,” “I didn’t serve you; it was my colleague,” “It was our suppliers/our delivery service/the mail carrier/our stupid policies/my ridiculous manager” and the worst, “What did you expect anyway—it was on sale.”

Asking dozens of seemingly irrelevant questions before attempting to help—Maybe the company needs the answers to some questions, but inquiries are not a good way to start the service recovery process: “What is your name? Your address? When did you buy this article? Who helped you? Who told you that? Did you pay cash? Where is your receipt? Do you have a customer registration number? What is your mother’s maiden name?”

Subjecting customers to the third degree—Interrogating customers stems from doubt about their motivations, competence, or right to complain: “How can I be sure what you say is true? Are you sure you bought it here? Did you follow the instructions? Did you read the thirty-page fine-print document listing all the exceptions? Did you even read any of the instructions? Are you sure you didn’t drop it?” The interrogation frequently ends with “Anyone can make a claim. You wouldn’t believe the stories we hear.”

Customers pick up all these subtle and not-so-subtle clues telling them not to complain even if the complaint handler is not aware of his or her effect on them. Customers are not dense. They feel the rudeness. If customers persist in complaining in the face of all these disincentives, they may be on their way to creating serious problems for the company as they leave.

After all, most customers are of two minds about complaining in the first place—“Should I complain or not?”—so they read all sorts of rejections and insults into what they hear. When customers are treated poorly when they complain, the service failure they just experienced gets magnified and long remembered. Emotionally, the customer is out of balance, and even small product or service problems will be experienced in the future as a huge service failure. This only happens, however, if customers are willing to speak up and tell service representatives about their dissatisfaction in the first place. You’ll see in this book how customers are remarkably good at not telling you what went wrong, leaving your business without concrete action to take and instead exposed online.

Complaints unearth clues telling you precisely what you need to do to keep customers. Doing this is not difficult—except for the fact that large numbers of service providers and people don’t like receiving complaints. They feel unfairly blamed in many cases and don’t understand how something that wasn’t their fault could end up being a weapon to attack them. When this happens too frequently, CSRs get discouraged and either show up with little energy to make a positive connection with their customers or dish the attack right back. None of this fits the mindset that complaints are gifts.

How Many Customers Complain?

What percentage of customers complain? The numbers vary, but significant amounts and valuable information are missed because of the few numbers of customers who complain. Here’s a sampling of well-established research studies:

I have asked participants in groups to brainstorm a list of all the reasons they don’t complain. Some groups produce more than a hundred reasons why they don’t complain, including “The person helping me looks like my nephew, and I really like him.” Don’t skip over this partial list. They are creative reasons—some fun to read—that can provide a lesson as to how few complaints you probably hear from your customers.

The Gap between Intent and Impact

Evaluating how effective service-recovery employees handle complaints is difficult if surveys are the measuring stick. We know most customers don’t want to directly give negative feedback to a person. Customers are more likely to say something negative about a material product than a person, even if the complaint handler was rude. As a result, precisely answering the question “How good are people at handling complaints” is problematic. Many variables can be measured: in person versus online, business products versus personal products, younger consumers versus older consumers, major product purchases versus small product purchases, expensive products versus cheap products, or branded versus generic. However, when you ask CSRs how good they are at service in general, they say they do an excellent job but it’s their customers or their bosses who make it difficult. Customers don’t explain their issues well or they exaggerate. Their bosses don’t empower them to do what is necessary.

Customers have a different story when asked how well they are treated when they have a complaint. They can become so irritated that they blame the service provider. They may send nonverbal clues about the impact of what bothers them, which are ignored because the CSR feels blamed and attacked, so they aren’t paying attention to the underlying messages customers are sending.

People can easily get into a game of tug-of-war when intent and impact run into each other: “I tried as hard as I could. Sometimes mistakes occur. I didn’t intentionally try to hurt this customer.” After all, complaint handlers were following the rules, doing what they were trained to do to protect the company from fraud. Intent doesn’t count for much when the result is that customers judge the handling of their complaints as inadequate, unfair, and unfeeling. Companies need to be aware of the differences between intent and impact and how long the sting of bad treatment can stay with a customer.

Customers Have Long Memories of Poor Complaint Handling

A reader of the first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift missed her red-eye connecting flight by minutes to get to an East Coast destination. She wrote me a letter telling me that her father had agreed to pick her up at six thirty the next morning and take her to a critical sales meeting, the purpose of her cross-country flight. She missed her sales appointment. After a different carrier finally got her to her destination, her luggage was lost for an additional two days. She still remembers the incident twenty years later.

She wrote her ticketing carrier asking for a full refund and received a response that no doubt followed the carrier’s rules or intent to any demand of this type—a one-hundred-dollar coupon for another flight. I’ve shortened the response letter, but it read as follows:

I’m so sorry we disappointed you. It’s easy to understand why you are not satisfied with us, and I wish I could change what happened. We want our customers to enjoy pleasant, trouble-free travel, but, unhappily, that was not your experience. Your business is important to us, and so is your goodwill. Although it is not our policy to offer the specific compensation you requested [a full ticket refund], I hope you will find the enclosed travel voucher to be a fair and reasonable compromise. We value you as a customer and are eager to restore your confidence. Please give us another opportunity to serve you.

That response is definitely a polite, positive letter, though it sounds like a script that is probably sent out multiple times daily by this giant carrier. The passenger’s emotionality was about her elderly father she couldn’t reach to tell him not to bother driving to the airport. Her father was not mentioned in the response, so she wrote a second letter to the airline and received the following response—another letter not so dissimilar from the first but with a bit more sauce.

Given that you have written to us again, I regret we are unable to settle this issue to your satisfaction. While I do understand the point you are making, I’m afraid we’re unwilling to resolve this matter as you have suggested. However, although we have high service standards, basically we are dealing with transportation. It would be an exceptional situation in any business to give a complete refund when the entire product is used. We are, nonetheless, enclosing a second $100 travel voucher.

The intent of this letter was basically “Go away, madam. We’re not doing anything more for you, so take our coupon and go away!” That is how my participant read it. She did not get a sense of real regret. The justification is the airline got her to the East Coast. What would happen if the airline asked an ad agency to concoct an advertisement offering this type of transportation experience? “We won’t get you to your connecting flights, so you’ll miss your final destination, and we’ll lose your luggage. Forget about getting a refund. After all, this is what happens in transportation!” My participant wrote a third letter, this time to the airline’s CEO. His letter was forwarded to a staff supervisor (an upgrade from the staff assistant), who responded:

Our CEO has forwarded your most recent correspondence to me. We regret that you are still dissatisfied with our handling of your complaint as well as the fact you believe you were mistreated. It was never our intention to offend you. [While the offense was not the intention, that was the impact! All you have to do is read the passenger’s letters to this airline, and her feeling of being mistreated stands out loud and clear.] We have tried in every way we know how to explain the reasons why we cannot satisfy your request. While we know you question the generosity of our offer, the vouchers you received represent more than our obligation in circumstances of this kind. [The two one-hundred-dollar vouchers were likely getting close to meeting the price of her red-eye ticket, so why not just sincerely apologize and refund the entire amount?] I’m not eager to disappoint you again; however, we can’t agree to further reimbursement. [Yet disappoint you is what I am going to do.] Our decision is final and firm. Please understand we have given every consideration to your position; however, we stand by our response. I hope in time you will come to accept our decision. [Impact: “Don’t you see what we are doing for you? It’s not every day an airline gives you two hundred dollars in vouchers. Get off your high horse and accept our generous offer.”]

The passenger acknowledged she just needed a few more dollars to break even after applying the coupons she was given. What she really wanted was an apology for how she was treated in the West Coast airport, where she was yelled and sworn at. She admits she had become hysterical, but she wanted understanding of how she felt for the situation she had put her father in. Complaint handlers must understand that satisfying a customer has a great deal to do with impact, not just intent. I’m sure this airline had all kinds of good intentions to handle this type of “transportation” mishap. Instead, this woman will never fly this airline again, never use those coupons, and did not allow anyone in her company to fly again with it, as she says, “even in emergencies.” When I followed up with her years later, she had yet to fly with it again. Impact outweighed the intent of company policies in handling “transportation” issues. It should be obvious transportation is this airline’s business. She even asked me to please include the airline’s name.

Here’s another long-remembered poor complaint handling. Mitch Gooze, a professional speaker, purchased electronic equipment from LG. Gooze was treated very poorly—twenty years ago. For a requested refund of $130 never received, Gooze instead bought new appliances from a different company for his son to the tune of five thousand dollars. He said he liked LG, but he would never buy from it again because of the bad way he was treated. The point of both stories is that impact can matter some twenty years later. Gooze still tells his LG story when he speaks. I know this because I asked him in early November 2021 if he remembers what happened. “Oh yes,” he replied. “Still at it. It’s a good story.” If more companies truly appreciated the cost of intending to settle a complaint compared to the damage that can be done when it’s not, they would be more ready to empower their employees to care for customers when the situation demands it. They would compare short-term gains (intent) against the cost of long-term anger and hostility (impact) that can be gnawed at for decades.

Granted, these two examples are anecdotal, but they reflect research suggesting when people talk about bad complaint handling, they frequently recall instances that happened years ago. A woman in one of my seminars excitedly described a situation where a waiter set her hair on fire. He was bringing a birthday cake with a lighted candle to her table and dropped it on her head. He poured water on her head to stop the flames, then fluffed up her hair, and told her it didn’t look that bad. People examined her head to see the damage. Everyone was shocked and appalled by the event, which happened in a hotel across the street from where we were meeting. We asked her when this occurred. “Thirty years ago,” she replied.