A new way to handle complaints. Or is it?

What a lot of money we have been wasting on dealing with customer complaints.

Instead of dealing with them and attempting to satisfy the customer we should be creating a process that makes complaining more difficult.

Then when customers complain they will get a huge negative experience and no satisfaction. This will make them think very hard before they complain again.

This approach is working already.

Fifteen Years ago I moved up to the West Coast of Scotland.

After three years of the Highlands I decided to make it my permanent home and settled down to live in the most beautiful imaginable spot on the shores of Loch Long.

In the mornings I would listen to the radio, gently smiling at the all the roads in England that were listed almost daily as the announcer plunged again and again through the litany of names that spelled delays and frustration for millions of trapped motorists.

I had previously lived in the South of England and one of the principal reasons for getting away was to avoid the frustrations caused by the daily movement of large numbers of people that were a permanent feature of living in this overcrowded corner of the country.

I felt quite smug to have escaped but several years ago cruel circumstance forced me back to within commuting distance of London.

The first thing I decided was that any trips to London would be on the train.

I had spent too long laughing at the travel news to believe that it would ever be possible to penetrate inside the orbital M25 in a car.

On my first trip to London I got a lift to the station. It was only fifteen minutes, then I stood on the platform waiting for the train.

There was a train due every fifteen minutes and after about ten minutes one arrived.

Travel time was to be an hour so I sat down to read some proofs.

As the train got closer to London it filled up until the announcer declared that the train was full and would not now stop until it arrived in London.

I have since discovered that this is the normal routine but at the time was heartened to hear what I thought was a sensible decision being taken.

The train was full but not uncomfortable in the same way that a full underground train is.

After a further ten minutes the announcer came on again to tell us that the train was broken and that instead of delivering us to our station of choice in London, it would now drop us on the outskirts from whence we would have to make our own way to town on the underground.

It took me a while, and a conversation with the man next to me, to decipher what the change meant to me in terms of connections etc. but having left an optimistic 45 minute buffer for my speaking engagement I worked out that I could cope with the extra delay.

Having settled my own mind I started to look at my fellow passengers and realised that when the announcement had been made there had been absolutely no reaction from any of them.
There was no hint of outrage, no gasp of resignation and no casting heavenwards of the eyes of despair.

No reaction at all!
I began to ask why that was.
Did the train break down every day?

That could explain the lack of reaction but it hardly seemed credible.
There had to be an expectation of some sort that caused this complete lack of response, and I thought that I could see what it was.

When we are given a stimulus we respond to it.
We are drawn towards warmth as we also avoid heat and cold.
Pavlov created an expectation of hunger in his dogs with the bell such that they salivated when it rang even when no food was present.

The lack of response that I saw on the train told me that the passenger’s expectation was that they were absolutely powerless to do anything about their situation and therefore there was no point wasting any energy on being indignant or concerned.

When the train stopped everybody got off and I followed as we descended into the tube station to continue our journey into London.
It was on the underground train that it suddenly occurred to me, what a lot of money we have been wasting on dealing with customer complaints.

If instead of dealing with complaints and attempting to satisfy the customer we instead create a process that makes complaining so difficult that when customers complain they get a huge negative experience and never receive any satisfaction, they will think very hard before they complain again.

Before long the expectation of the customers is that there is nothing to be gained by complaining and the whole of the resource that was dedicated to dealing with complaints can be reallocated to other more needy areas of the organisation.
Provision of nursery care for the children of employees and assisted study programs to retrain the personnel who used to work in the complaints department.

There would be a small staff kept on to deal with the complaints about why there was no complaints department but, using the same strategy, that too could be phased out in time.

The one requirement for the organisation considering this strategy would be a captive market.
So long as the customer did not have a choice I felt that I was on to a winner.

The more I thought about it the more I realised that all of the organisations for whom the prerequisite of a captive market already existed, had been running this system for years.
The power companies, banks, mortgage companies, local and transport authorities, utilities.

That is why the passengers on the train failed to react because these organisations have already created an expectation that complaining is pointless.

These same people will still react when their cheap no frills flight fails to turn up but that is simply because these airlines are relatively new in business and the public expectation that complaining is pointless has not yet been made.

These airlines are working hard at their complaints procedure. Soon the number of complaints they receive will begin to fall off too, as the public realise that nothing they do or say will make any difference to the level of service.

While they are still receiving complaints they have still got some way to go.

Give them time, they will soon catch up.

Peter created the “Breaking the Mould” process to make his astonishing results available to clients in all industries, public and private, large and small. Once you have understood the simplicity of ‘Breaking the Mould’ – it will transform your life forever! visit www.breakingthemould.co.uk.