CHAPTER ONE

What Exactly Are Complaints?

Complaints are gifts that customers give businesses. Because they are gifts, complaint handlers need to carefully open these packages to see what is inside. The first step is to feel gratitude that customers have complained in the first place since so few of them do. Otherwise, businesses would never hear about how they fail their customers and have a chance to repair the damage. But first what are complaints? As this book title proclaims, complaints are gifts.

Let me include a word of caution here. How you define complaints will shape how you react when receiving them, so let’s use the most straightforward description of this complex customer activity. Complaints are statements about expectations not met.

Complaints Are Complex Opportunities

More than a few factors make handling complaints complex—even tricky. One factor is few people have the mental fortitude to deal with people issues all day long—regardless of how customers complain. Without fortitude and resilience, complaint handlers run the risk of burnout. And burnout leads to a lack of empathy toward the people they are trying to help. We’ll cover this topic in depth in chapter 8.

Adding another dimension of complexity, CSRs are located throughout different departments in organizations. Some complaint handlers are called service technicians, others are called service reps. And each department has its own ideas about effective complaint handling or service assistance. Big computer companies think of their call-center employees as computer technicians, but the bottom line is they still handle complaints. Other complaint handlers include retail service staff, health-care workers, product-exchange staff, administrative staff, and sales staff. Rarely do complaint handlers only handle complaints.

Perhaps we should start calling complaint handlers “problem solvers” since that’s largely what they do. This would also stop CSRs from thinking that what they do all day long is interact with complaining customers. The Merriam-Webster thesaurus has more than fifty synonyms in English for the word complainer, and none of them are compliments. It includes whiner, fussbudget, fusser, grumbler, kvetch, bellyacher, squawker, crab, crank, faultfinder, nagger, nitpicker, and objector. I noticed it does not describe a complainer as a “gift giver.” Maybe we need to change that.

Another huge contributing factor to complaint complexity is that most customers don’t complain when facing a problem. Dozens of studies reinforce this fact, and there are multiple reasons why this is so. Researchers say a “feeling nothing will happen” is the most common reason customers don’t complain.¹ Another common reason cited by customers is they are afraid something negative will happen due to their complaining. But customers have hundreds more reasons why they don’t complain—at least to anyone who can do something about their issue. They tell people standing in line, family, friends, and anybody else who will listen. They’ll even tell strangers while riding in a bus.

Perhaps the most important factor about why complaints are complex is they are also opportunities for CSRs to emotionally reconnect with customers when they have a service or product breakdown. Solving a problem is one thing, doing it with empathy is another. CSRs who fix customer problems can upsell, perhaps even more easily than salespeople. They are seen as problem solvers rather than salespeople who just want to sell. As a result, complaint handlers play a number of roles, none of which are particularly easy, such as sales, complaint handling, public relations, marketing, and customer retention.

Top Line Messages versus Embedded Threats

Many complaints are presented at a surface level but underneath could be looming threats from customers to leave your business. That’s a complex opportunity. Let’s look at some examples:

What do you suppose most CSRs hear—the first glance complaint or the fundamental message? Unfortunately, all too many hear only the top-line message. When organizations listen to customers with open minds, empathy, and flexibility, they can see the fundamental message the customer is attempting to express.

Complaints have direct “at first glance” messages in them. They also have emotional reactions and messages embedded inside the complaint story, rarely explicitly stated, except perhaps by showing irritation. My own experience is that complaints that are grounded in concrete reasons (“These pants got ripped,” “The seams weren’t strong enough”) are listened to with greater respect by CSRs than complaints that are expressed in highly emotional terms (“It was the worst moment of my life when the seams on these pants split open,” “I was horrified by how everyone saw it. I’ll never forget what happened”). I contend all complaints have an emotional component—even if hidden—and they are all legitimate (unless, or course, the customer is committing fraud).

Customers Want Their Emotions Recognized

Complaint handlers need to accept that emotions are always present when someone complains. Period. It’s tempting to put emphasis solely on solving the customer’s issue when first hearing a complaint. In that case, customers remain frustrated or may not listen to a proposed solution, even if it’s a good one. Likely, the CSR also gets frustrated and thinks, “Gosh darn it, can’t they see I have offered them a solution!” Now both are emotional, which only exacerbates the situation.

Research studies over the years have concluded that customers don’t just want their problems solved.² Of course, they want some type of solution, but they don’t necessarily expect their needs to be completely met. In other words, they don’t demand perfection for them to stick with you. Satisfaction with how their complaints are handled is worth more than replacing a broken object, offering a discount, or refunding the amount paid for the purchase. Even though customers won’t necessarily acknowledge this, satisfaction has as much to do with how their emotions are recognized and handled during the process.

Errors are a given. But dissatisfied customers are definitely not. Multiple studies cited in this book underscore an essential point: complaint handling has to do with taking care of customers’ problems. But how complaints are emotionally handled has a great deal to do with keeping customers loyal.

A business owner friend experienced a great example of this a few years ago when taking care of one of his customer’s problems, which strengthened that client relationship. The customer, who represented millions of dollars in sales—a way too high percentage of my friend’s total sales—called while he was at a trade show in Las Vegas. A quality problem with one of his products potentially would shut down his client’s entire production line in Mexico, costing thousands of dollars daily. The owner was told he needed to be at the plant in Nogales, Mexico, the next day by ten in the morning, never mind the logistics of getting to a destination in Mexico some five hundred miles away. He rented a car, drove to Phoenix, slept overnight, and then drove early the next morning to Tucson, where he lived. He picked up his own car to drive across the Mexican border. On time at ten o’clock that morning, he met with his client’s team, who then laid out the problem.

It turns out the issue was a simple communication matter that took about ten minutes to clear up. The owner said the head of purchasing, who opened the meeting, said, “I can assume the problem is solved since our supplier is dealing with it, and we won’t have this issue again.” If my friend hadn’t been contacted in Las Vegas, the issue would probably have been handled by the production team, resulting in the line going down and everyone fighting over who was to blame. Instead, he was given a gift to deal with an easily fixed issue. Yet it could have been solved over the phone while he was at the trade show—so was it a gift or not?

Here’s how my friend summarized the situation: “Even though getting to the meeting was an incredible inconvenience, the head of purchasing clearly enunciated his concerns in his communication with me. It led to a resolution of the issue that day. I came up with a long-term solution that benefited not only my customer but also all our other customers whose programs mimicked theirs.” When I asked him if he thought this complaint was a gift, he said, “You better believe it. We enjoyed a stronger relationship with that company, which bought some 280 million parts from us each year. Yeah, it was a great big gift!” It also made him realize his business shouldn’t have so much of its revenue tied up with one customer. Another gift!

In a Harvard Business Review article, Christopher Hart, James Heskett, and W. Earl Sasser Jr. provide another powerful example that could be as true today as when it happened in 1990. Club Med employees took matters into their own hands to take care of customers after a situation occurred that they couldn’t undo. It’s important to note you can’t establish scripted complaint solutions to handle the emotional dimensions of complex situations. You have to have empowered employees who know their way around emotions. Then the magic can be considerable.³

A Club Med Cancún holiday had a very rocky beginning with multiple airline delays resulting in vacationers arriving ten hours late to the start of their holiday. Seeing what had happened, the resort manager took half his staff with food, drinks, and a stereo system to the airport. They warmly greeted the tired and irritated customers, played upbeat music, helped them with luggage, invited them to have a snack, and chauffeured everyone to the resort. At Club Med, another banquet was laid out for the guests, a mariachi band entertained, and the champagne didn’t hurt either. Other guests already at Club Med were invited to join in the fun, partying until the early morning hours. According to customer evaluations, massive goodwill and memories were had by all who started with arrival delays that couldn’t be fixed. Does anyone imagine a discount coupon to attend another Club Med site would have emotionally satisfied those customers?

To handle someone else’s emotions, you have to make sure your own emotions are under control. In chapter 8 an entire section is devoted to the subject of mental fortitude. Once you know how to handle a complaint in a way that leaves both of you feeling good about the resolution, then meeting the customers’ needs is much easier.

The Emotional Side of Complaints

Businesses can choose from a multitude of ways to deal with the complex challenge of attracting and retaining customers, but this goal is essential for every business. According to the Strategic Planning Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offering service focused on caring for customers results in customers staying up to 50 percent longer. This, in turn, reduces marketing costs by between 20 and 40 percent and ultimately leads to better net returns of between 7 and 17 percent. A lot of revenue resides in these percentages—numbers that add up to vast sums of money for businesses.⁴

Weaving emotional value into the service experience is important. Even though emotions are always present when complaints are made and handled, this idea is not as clearly addressed in most literature on complaint handling. As I underscored in my book Emotional Value, “Emotional value is the economic worth of feelings.”⁵ The challenge is getting service workers to recognize that one part of their job is adding this type of value to their complaint handling.

Focusing on and understanding customer emotions has little to do with psychoanalyzing them. CSRs need to accept that something important is happening when customers complain. Complaint handlers may think passionate displays get in the way of solving problems, but from the customers’ point of view, emotions, even shouted emotions, are a relevant part of their communication. The way complaints are handled can be just as important as fixing the event failure itself, and seeing a complaint as a gift can be as important as solving a problem. Thus, even if emotions are difficult to manage and measure, they must be considered, especially when attempting to build long-term customer relationships.

By being aware of the emotional reactions within a transaction, CSRs can help guide those emotions in the best direction for everyone concerned—themselves and their customers. This requires awareness of self and others, involvement and objectivity, control and reaction, self-focus and outer focus. That’s a lot to ask of complaint handlers, but each is part of this complex work. Without question, complaints are emotional opportunities. Research shows that consumers are more likely to be retained if emotional care is shown while fixing the problem.⁶ Furthermore, when complaints are handled well, they transform into experiences more positively remembered than if no complaint has been made at all.

Ignoring customer emotions and instead solely focusing on solving problems doesn’t add much emotional value. The CSR may be thinking, “I’ve got to fix the problem so I can get on to the next customer.” To effectively deal with the emotionality of complaining customers, however, it’s better to focus on the individual, not the problem. We call this empathy. The biggest gift of empathy is when the customer enjoys the experience of being heard.

Customers are reluctant to acknowledge they fear not being heard or believed. Whenever I take a product back to Costco, for whatever reason, I get nervous, even though Costco makes the process streamlined and easy. I feel guilt and shame that I bought the product, which causes me to think I probably should take responsibility for having made a poor choice. Once, I returned a spoiled food item I had purchased a day earlier. Did the clerk think I was trying to defraud the company in some way? To assuage my guilt, the clerk might have said, “Oh, that’s terrible. It must have been awful to open that carton of milk and pour it on your cereal.” My nervousness isn’t Costco’s fault, but it’s part of the reality of customers’ emotions and their total experience.

What’s the strongest emotion your customer is likely to experience? Imagine whatever the customer is complaining about has just happened to you. Put yourself in their shoes and ask what would you be thinking and feeling. How would you likely react? What would you expect, and what would it take to make you happy, to walk away and feel good about your complaint? If you can identify that emotion, it can help you respond appropriately.

If the customer feels betrayed, for example, it’s a good idea to tell your customer you are very concerned about what happened because your strongest wish is to take good care of them in a fair manner. If your customer feels sad, then comfort is in order. If your customer is angry, keep emphasizing that you hear what they are saying and are going to do everything you can to help. And definitely apologize!

To do this requires psychological flexibility. As Maureen O’Hara, president emeritus of Saybrook University, once summarized the matter about today’s service workers, “People need . . . a whole set of higher-order mental skills: openness to learning, a capacity for self-criticism, low defensiveness, and the ability to process multiple realities and values.”⁷ Businesses don’t just hire people off the street who happen to possess these types of psychological skills. Almost always, people need to be educated in emotional complaint handling and not just taught to fix tangible products.

Customers Have Long-Lasting Memories of Emotional Experiences

Running away from customer emotions only contributes to the likelihood of the customer not returning. Customers, like elephants, have long-lasting memories, especially if they felt embarrassed. Even highly emotional customers can be enticed to return if they are handled with empathy. Memories of complaints tend to be stronger than other customer interactions due to how the brain remembers emotional experiences. Joseph LeDoux, professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University, explains that emotional memories get stored in two parts of the brain. The memory of the event is stored in the same place in the brain that holds other facts. But the brain stores memories of the feelings (the rapid heartbeat, the flushed face) deep in its interior. When the brain remembers an emotional memory, it recalls the factual part of the event (what happened, who said what, etc.) and simultaneously recalls the feelings experienced. As LeDoux concluded, “The brain fuses the two [memories] so it makes it seem like they’re coming from the same place.” As a result, because the brain is remembering in stereo, these types of memories feel much stronger.⁸

If you look closely and listen carefully, you can almost always hear or see customers’ emotions when they complain. You can see it in their faces and hear it in their words. If you can’t see any emotions, they’re probably there anyway waiting for a spark to bring them to the surface. Address the emotionality you see right in front of you before you attempt to solve any problems—unless, of course, you’re dealing with an emergency. If you try to solve the problem first without handling emotions, customers will probably still be upset with you regardless of what you do for them. Your efforts will lose their impact. Get customers’ emotions on your side right away. Start with rapport, which we will discuss in chapter 4, to create the foundation for the A Complaint Is a Gift mindset.

While looking for possible emotions customers express, be careful to not blame them. Blaming is a behavior, not an emotion. It’s an act of holding someone other than yourself responsible for what happened. It accuses them of doing something or not doing something. You may be accurate insofar as the customer was to blame, but being blamed infuriates customers. When we are accused of something, it takes most of us back to our childhoods when our parents scolded us. We can instead use emotionally sensitive ways to get information from customers without blaming them. Remember, it took some effort for customers to say something went wrong. When they hear blaming statements thrown at them, they feel further betrayed.

Some years ago, in an exploratory survey, researchers found over one-third of managers believe customers complain to get something for nothing; about 25 percent believe customers are confused when they complain, and almost 15 percent believe customers are flat-out wrong when they complain.⁹ The good news is that CSRs, more so than managers, are more likely to accept the legitimacy of consumers’ complaints. This may reduce the amount of customer blaming that takes place.

Complaints and Attribution

People don’t like to be blamed; we know from attribution theory that when blamed we typically start looking outside ourselves to see who is at fault. The complaint dynamic can quickly begin with both the complaint handler and the complainer mirroring each other in regard to blame.

Complaints have a bad reputation, and for good reason. When customers complain, they are saying they do not like something about you or something you or your company did. Who likes to hear that? It means something is wrong with you. Complaints have a strong component of blame wrapped in them, also called negative attribution. However, when something positive happens, people tend to take credit for it. For example, a customer buying a pair of slacks will likely think themselves rather nifty for finding the piece of clothing for which they receive compliments, even if a shopkeeper found the slacks, brought them to the buyer, and urged them to purchase. A home buyer who follows the design suggestions of the salesperson and then receives a compliment about the arches in their home will take credit for the stunning arches.

Most of us like to blame other individuals or systems when expectations aren’t being met. According to a research study at Saint Louis University, customers were found to blame specific firms or individuals for a problem even if they themselves caused it. This means employees, specifically those whom customers are eye to eye or ear to ear with, are blamed for a product or service failure. Researchers found employees do the same but in reverse, blaming specific customers when hearing complaints. Furthermore, when customers engage in socially unacceptable behavior, like shouting or swearing at employees, they are more likely to be blamed for their problems. When this happens, service providers tend to refuse product exchanges or make them difficult.¹⁰

Most employees understand that blaming customers is not a behavior likely to get them high marks from customers or promoted by their managers, so they mask their feelings and try to come up with more acceptable theories as to why the issue came up. A common explanation rests the blame on the organization, its policies, or management. The employee may say to customers, “I’d really like to help you, but there’s nothing I can do. Our policy . . .” or “My hands are tied. I’ll get in trouble if I do that for you. So sorry.”

The father of modern attribution theory, Fritz Heider, notes most of us attribute blame to people rather than the circumstances surrounding any product or service failure.¹¹ In addition, blaming company policies accomplishes little because blaming doesn’t resolve problems, nor does it stop customers from blaming the employees. Even if employees indicate they disagree with the policies in place, most customers don’t distinguish employee behavior from company procedures. And customers have learned that exceptions can always be made.

In addition, most service delivery today is complex in that more than one firm or individual probably has been involved in the service failure. This means service providers need to carefully explain what happened without sounding as if they are putting blame on someone else. This can be accomplished by saying, “I’m going to take responsibility for this, even though several people or businesses were involved. We need to find out what happened so I can solve this problem for you.”

I conducted a two-hour virtual program with a successful company whose primary product is a commodity. The head of the company, with eighty of his top managers listening in, said at the end of my webinar:

We’ve been blind about our mistakes. We have an obvious one affecting our brand, and it irritates the hell out of our customers. Our plastic bags, which are a big source of advertisement for us because we put our logo all over them, break open and our product spills. It’s not really our fault because those bags are bought by our head office from a distributor for all our locations. They aren’t strong enough to get tossed around and remain whole. But those bags are clearly our responsibility. And we just shove the blame off to our bag supplier. We have to change this.

He learned a clear lesson about attribution and responsibility that day.

To consider complaints as gifts, we must accept the notion customers always have a right to complain—even when we think their complaints are stupid, unreasonable, or wrong; cause inconveniences; or are not our fault. And we should want to hear them. If you believe the customer has a right to complain, you are less likely to attribute their complaints to stupidity or dishonesty.

Among the best chains in the United States, two grocery stores work at their customer service on many levels, including how they handle complaints. Publix Super Markets has won just about every award for customer service, including the 2021 Newsweek magazine’s America’s Best Customer Service in Supermarkets, beating out Wegmans Food Markets, which has also won the top award multiple times.¹² Publix is the largest employee-owned supermarket in the United States. Primarily located in six southern states, its complaints and where to post them are easily found on its web page. Wegmans, a popular chain in upper northeastern United States, operates under a similar promise: “Every day you get our best,” and that means “[we] will listen to your complaints so [we] can get better.”¹³ Both companies quickly respond to complaints.

Wegmans, founded in 1916, has won over thirty significant awards for its uniqueness, customer service, and for “changing the way we shop.” Both stores have been named among the one hundred best places to work in America by Fortune magazine almost every year since the list started in 1988. These awards reflect how Wegmans and Publix see satisfying customers with complaints as a critical part of their business strategy.