The saying
"No news is good news"
is a really bad idea in customer service. That's one
conclusion of a study that examined customer complaints
conducted by Jagdip Singh, of Case Western Reserve
University, and Robert Wilkes, of Texas Tech. They
investigated the ties that connect customer dissatisfaction
with complaining and looked for factors shared by people who
chose different ways to complain. They found 345 people who
had had complaints with one of three service industries: car
repair, medical services, and banking, and analyzed their
answers to a battery of questions.
Singh and Wilkes began by noting 3 forms complaining
takes: 1) direct complaints from the customer to the service
provider, 2) indirect complaints to friends and relatives,
including changing patronage, and 3) agency complaints to
official bodies like the Better Business Bureau. They also
noted 3 characteristics of complaining: A) It is goal
directed - people hope to achieve a desirable goal (redress),
or to get even. B) There are multiple avenues to express
complaints, and C) Most unhappy consumers use more than one
way to complain.
Business people fare best when unhappy customers directly
voice their complaints so they have a chance to correct the
problem and recover the customer. They fare worst when
unhappy customers conceal their complaints and poison other
peoples' perceptions through negative word-of-mouth and when
they refuse to further patronize the business. Service
providers need to encourage direct complaints and discourage
indirect and agency complaints. Here's what Singh and Wilkes
learned that will help business owners meet this challenge.
When unhappy customers expected direct complaining to be
easy and likely to produce a satisfactory response, they were
very unlikely to use other forms of complaining.
The more dissatisfied the customer, the more vigorous and
varied the complaining.
Indirect complaining seemed to intensify customers'
dissatisfaction, and they were likely to turn to direct and
agency forms of complaining. Perhaps it is inherently
frustrating to complain to a person who can't offer redress.
When dissatisfied customers blame the business for the
problem, believing it could have been avoided and is likely
to happen again, they tend to use indirect and agency forms
of complaining, and their goal becomes getting even, rather
than redress. Both of these forms of complaining bypass the
business owner, giving him/her no chance to correct the
problem.
Fortunately, Singh and Wilkes discovered a bright spot:
These blame-assigning customers also often voice direct
complaints. So if you train your people to listen closely
and identify complaining customers who have assigned blame to
your business, you have a chance to weaken their attribution
of blame and defuse a dangerous campaigner against your firm
as you offer redress.
Train your people to listen for comments like
"This was deliberate,"
and
"You do this all the time."
And explain to your people the importance of weakening
customers' certainty that your firm is to blame. Take a
lesson from all the business people you encounter who offer
excuses for disappointing service, like late deliveries.
Their excuses weaken your attribution of blame on them, and
most likely, it will work for you too.
When dissatisfied customers feel alienated, they believe
all firms in an industry share blame, and they don't expect
business owners to adequately redress their complaints.
Their goals for complaining become finding ways to get even,
and they'll use multiple forms of complaining to do so.
Redress with them is very difficult, and service workers'
best strategy is to find ways to reduce the intensity of
their dissatisfaction. Intensity translated directly into
vigorous complaining. The more intense their
dissatisfaction, the more vigorous their indirect and agency
complaining, and the more dangerous they became for the
business. When you encounter alienated complainers, offer
them a cup of coffee as you listen to them rant and rave.
Singh and Wilkes conclude by dispelling the myth that we
should strive to close our customer complaint departments.
Rather, we should anticipate complaints at every point of
customer contact, train our people to recognize and respond
to blame-assigning and alienated complainers, and encourage
all dissatisfied customers to complain by making redress easy
and effective. Don't make them wait in line!
Reference: Singh, Jagdip, and Robert E. Wilkes (1996). When Consumers
Complain: A Path Analysis of the Key Antecedents of Consumer
Complaint Response Estimates. Journal of the Academy of marketing Science,
24 (4), 350-365.
Customer Psychology Findings, by James Larsen, Ph.D.
Managing Customer Complaints
Researchers discover new connections between dissatisfaction and complaining.