Page 5 - A Complaint is a Gift Excerpt

in troduction

Th e Customer Speaks

t has been over ten years since the fi rst edition of A Complaint Is
a Gift was published. It’s embarrassing to admit that we naively
I believed poorly handled complaints would be a thing of the past as
a result of the widespread distribution the original edition enjoyed. We
heard a number of “wow” examples, such as a medical supply company
in Kiev, Ukraine, that completely reorganized its approach to complaint
handling based solely on the contents of the Russian-translated version.
With examples like this from around the world, we assumed we’d soon
be able to stop talking about complaints—even though we would miss
that. Complaints are a fun topic for speeches. Stories about poorly han-
dled complaints arouse a great deal of eye rolling and tongue clucking.
We thought everyone would have understood that complaints are gift s.
It didn’t happen. In a 2006 survey of 3,200 U.S. and European
consumers, 86 percent of respondents said their “trust in corporations
1
has declined in the past fi ve years.” In 2007, RightNow Technologies
reported that aft er suff ering a negative service experience,

• 80 percent of U.S. adults decided to never go back to that company
• 74 percent registered a complaint or told others
• 47 percent swore or shouted
• 29 percent reported they got a headache, felt their chest tighten, or cried
• 13 percent fought back by posting a negative online review or blog
comment 2

1