Michele Comeau and Ian Brooks

Most business people don’t realise how fortunate they are to have an unhappy customer standing in front of them. After all, only one out of every nine unhappy customers bothers to complain. The rest simply take their business elsewhere. What’s worse, unhappy customers typically tell between five and twenty others about their bad experience.

Not all dissatisfied customers are this pleasant. Sometimes dissatisfied customers are vocal, demanding, and not very nice. Some customers even lose it totally.

For example, Mrs Jones needs to open a new account at her bank. She calls the branch she goes to and is told she needs to come in and open the new account in person. Thinking it can’t take all that long to open an account, she decides to skip lunch and pop into the bank on her break.

Mrs Jones sees the queue and her heart sinks. After what seems like an eternity, she reaches the counter - only to be told she needs to see her personal banker.
'Great, where is he?' she asks.
'He won’t be back until this afternoon. You should have called and made an appointment.'
Mrs Jones is starting to feel frustrated.
'Hold on,' she cries. 'I was told to come to the branch. No one said anything about seeing my personal banker.'
'Well, they should have told you,' sighs the teller looking past Mrs Jones to the line of people standing behind her.
It was clear to Mrs Jones the teller wanted her to go away.
Raising her voice in anger, Mrs Jones says loudly, 'That’s easy for you to say. You’re not missing your lunch only to find out your bank couldn’t care less about looking after its customers.'
Startled by the outburst, and feeling embarrassed and threatened, the teller defends herself.
'Look, it’s not my fault that you weren’t told. I don’t make the rules. I’m just doing my job. You’ll have to go and see the manager if you’re not happy.'
Mrs Jones is furious at being spoken to like that - especially by someone half her age. She storms off.
The next day she closes all her accounts, moves her $250,000 mortgage to another bank, and spends the next three weeks telling anyone who will listen about her uncaring and incompetent old bank and how she has moved to a much better one.

Customers can be so unreasonable! But if we look closely at Mrs Jones’ behaviour, we can see that her ‘unreasonableness’ didn’t come out of nowhere. It developed in response to the teller’s behaviour. The teller’s reaction first caused Mrs Jones to feel frustrated, then angry and then furious. It nearly always works like that.

There is a better way.

A dissatisfied customer is like having a prickly weed in your garden. If you try to pull it out, it hurts your hand. If you leave it there, it is guaranteed to grow, mature and go to seed. In no time at all, you will have a garden full of prickly weeds.

That is exactly what happens if you don’t look after the complaining customer properly. If you don’t hear their complaint and take care of it, they will tell lots of others about their bad experience. The story may become legendary within their sphere of influence and drive away other customers. Also, if you don’t fix the problem that caused the complaint in the first place, it will continue to create dissatisfied customers. What’s the future in that?

In the garden, you use tools to take care of weeds so you don’t hurt your hands when you try to take care of them. First you put on gloves to protect your hands, and then you use a fork or a trowel to take care of the weed. It is the same with handling complaints - you need tools to help you succeed.

First, protect yourself. Don’t take the complaint personally. Wrap yourself in a layer of professionalism. Tell yourself, ‘It is not my fault that something went wrong for the customer. We have a process problem somewhere in the business. But as a business professional, it is my job to turn this customer into a raving fan and to alert my manager to the fact we have a process problem so we don’t keep letting our customers down.’

Next, you need some tools to take care of the prickly weeds.

LAUGH Formula - 5 Steps for Turning Complaints into Cash

Listen and empathise
Acknowledge the wrong and apologise
Understand and take ownership
Give – fix the problem and do something extra
Hit home with a follow-up and learn from the mistake

Michele Comeau and Ian Brooks are the authors of the book, 'How to Turn Complaints into Cash'.