Hi everyone…

I found an article on customer complaints. I’ve copied it and paste it in here. A very interesting article. Check it out below.

Complaints are gifts. Complaints provide an excellent feedback mechanism that can help organizations rapidly and inexpensively shift products, service style, and/or market focus to meet the needs of the customers, who after all pay the bills and are the reason why we remain in business in the first place. Every organization has its share of unsatisfied customers. Dealing with complaints is seldom easy or fun. Nevertheless, each complaint is an opportunity to solve a problem, right a wrong or salvage a valuable customer relationship that is in jeopardy of being lost.

Responding to serious complaints can be the quickest, easiest way to pinpoint products, services, systems or people who aren’t functioning as intended. It can also provide a reality check of an organization’s response time and capacity to correct mistakes. Insensitive or inappropriate responses to complaints can quickly turn minor cases of customer dissatisfaction into a major problem of customer defection.

Complaints aren’t just nuisances or inconveniences. You don’t get complaints because of bad luck. You get them because of bad performance. Complaints can be valuable warning signs. They can serve as real world tests of your company’s problem-solving capability. With out them, glitches, weak links or other difficulties can easily go unnoticed, undetected and unresolved until serious problems result.

It is time for all organizations to think of complaint handling as a strategic tool, an opportunity to learn something about our products or services we did not already know and as a market asset, rather than a nuisance or a cost. Without customers, businesses simply do not exist. Yet it seems as if customers have only recently been discovered. It is only in the last 15 – 20 years that we have begun to talk to customers in any meaningful way.

Customer complaints tell organizations how to improve services and products and thereby help to maintain market share. If businesses are able to identify and meet customer wants and needs, customers will generally pay more for their product. Repeat customers and their repeat business lower per-unit sales costs.