Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Ron Kaufman and Jeff Eilersen, and we’re looking at, what are the major reasons that clients come to us and say help! We need some support from an organization like yours to help us do better achieve service excellence, improve service performance. We’re up to number four which is simply… 

Jeff: “How do we manage complaints”? There’s the volume of complaints and the speed of complaints has increased dramatically particularly with technology, social media. So we have customers say “How are we gonna manage these complaints”? What’s interesting to me about this is the focus tends to be on how can we solve these complaints faster. And what’s often missing is, how can we get at the root cause of those complaints and change that or build it into our organizational learning in some way. And even more importantly how can we leverage the complaints to actually build customer loyalty. 

Ron: Okay, you’re saying a lot of things here. So one is the volume of complaints, people are willing to complain more, the speed you’re going to hear about it right away. But there’s also the severity of the impact of one of those complaints because of the social world and how many people are listening. What I heard you say is that then clients are focusing on how quickly can we resolve this. Rather than?

Jeff:  Rather than getting back to what caused it in the first place. There’s something that we need to do or change that can eliminate this complaint altogether. 

Ron: And does that lead to not only like, “How do we stop that problem but how do we design a better experience? So does this trigger a certain kind of, what else are we doing wrong or how could we actually make this much better.?

Jeff:  Yeah, it triggers what we talked about earlier which was, how do we change the experience and focus on the experience more than “what are we doing in our process”?.

Ron:  So how do we stop these complaints is like layer one. Then actually is there a way to turn this into a positive experience? Maybe we’ll even get some compliments. And then you said there’s the issue you didn’t use the term but of recovery. How do we take the person who suffered a bad experience and actually turn them into an advocate or an ambassador?

Jeff:   I think what’s interesting is sometimes the customer who complains has a problem, has an issue and if that’s resolved very well becomes a more loyal customer than the one who’s just going along and everything works fine. And yet I think organizations missed that point. They can really leverage these clients or customers who are complaining, have a problem, have a breakdown to build them into real strong advocates.

Ron:  But then you have to understand them as real human beings.

Jeff: You do and address them as real human beings both the emotional as well as the practical.

Ron:  Right, very good. So that person who suffered at your hands could actually become someone that you say “Got it. We’re terribly sorry, let us fix it and we understood what mattered to you. Let us do something more”.

Jeff: That’s right and there’s a quick jump to that’ll cost us too much money or it’s a financial decision of recovery. Well, really many customers want more of an emotional recovery or maybe the financial is worth the long-term investment. 

Ron: Yeah and the financially used to be called lifetime value of a customer to keep that customer. But now we’re also realizing that there’s severe potential impact, of not just satisfying that person. But actually, let’s take really good care of them. I love your point Jeff about somebody’s had a problem and you do a good job and you recover which is not just you recovering but your organization having a culture. And your people understanding, why we shouldn’t, how we can actually build that person who had a problem into one of your greatest ambassadors and advocates and people help to promote your organization.

Jeff: Yeah that’s absolutely right.

Ron: We’ll be right back with number five.