Janelle Barlow – A complaint is a gift!
When is a complaint a gift? Actually, almost every time. I’m so happy to have Dr. Janelle Barlow on to discuss this topic that’s so relevant to our industry and the world we live in. It’s not just about customer complaints, it’s also internal from our staff. We had a great discussion about reviews and other forms of feedback. Janelle shares ideas from her book “A Complaint Is A Gift”, which is in its 3rd printing, and available in over 25 languages!
About Janelle:
With decades of experience as a global speaker, virtual presenter, and author, her main speaking and consulting goal is to teach people how to treat complaints as gifts. She believes that with the right mindset, service reps and business owners do not have to be overwhelmed when listening to customer dissatisfaction. She has authored several books, including the best-selling “A Complaint Is a Gift”. She also wrote Branded Customer Service, Emotional Value, Smart Videoconferencing, and A Complaint Is a Gift, all published by Berrett-Koehler. She loves designing innovative learning projects and is currently working on a Complaint Is a Gift train-the-trainer guide and a online complaint program for service reps.
Janelle’s web page is: www.acomplaintisagift.com
LinkedIn: JanelleBarlow. and AComplaintIsaGift
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– When is a complaint, a gift? Listen to this episode and find out. Hi, it’s Alan berg. Welcome back to another episode of “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast.” I am so happy to have my friend Janelle, Dr. Janelle Barlow, on to talk about “A complaint as a gift” Welcome, Janelle.
– Oh, thank you. Thank you Alan. I’m really glad to be here.
– And we were chatting on LinkedIn about this and I said, “Well, let’s not chat here. Let’s get onto the podcast and let’s talk about this because this is what you speak about.” So where did this come from that brought you to, well, actually, give a little background, “I’m Dr. Janelle Barlow.”
– Okay. I’m Dr. Janelle Barlow. where this whole complaint as a gift came from I was with an international company and we had been working with the notion of a complaint as a gift. And so I said to the head of the company, “Let me write a book about this.” And I put his name on it as well. And now we’re into the third edition of it. He is no longer with us. He has passed over to the other side where there are no complaints. And he is, hopefully he’s listening in. So I’m still with this topic though. I can tell you over the last 30 years, the whole field of complaint handling has changed dramatically, as you can imagine.
– Right. Reviews, certainly, the fact that people no longer their soapbox is literally a soapbox where they can only tell the people within earshot. Now they can tell anybody anywhere.
– They can tell anybody anywhere. And they exaggerate.
– Well. So we know that very well in the wedding event industry because there are millions, literally millions of reviews out there. Some people know, you may not know, I was vice president of sales of theknot.com, which is the largest wedding website in the world and Wedding Wire. So they’re combined together into Knot Worldwide now. So they’re in 15 countries and they have literally millions, millions of reviews of wedding and event professionals on there. And we know that for the most part they are phenomenal. People hire a great people and they do a great job.
– Right.
– I actually got a phone call the other night from a very good friend who got her first one star review from a mother who was unhappy about something. We’ll get into the details, but that’s when I get the call. Their hair is on fire and they call me like, “Ah, what do I do?” And I have to talk them off the ledge.
– So let me ask you a question, Alan. Do you know, has anybody done big data analysis with all those millions of inputs?
– Well, Wedding Wire and The Knot definitely do. And one of the things that’s a challenge right now is because so many five star reviews are there. because this is different than a restaurant.
– Yes, that’s right.
– It’s different than a hotel. You travel, I travel. I’ve personally posted over 600 reviews on Tripadvisor, personally. So I travel a lot. But it’s hard for me to give a five star review on Tripadvisor because that’s like really, really, really top level, versus four, which means better than you expected. Three is kind of what you expected. Two is less than you expected. One is, it was way less than you expected. So if I go to a restaurant, and as a matter of fact, the first time I tried to post a five star on one of the sites, either the Yelp or Tripadvisor, it literally, Janelle, came up with a thing that said, “Was this one of the best meals you’ve ever had in a restaurant?” I was like, “Whoa, whoa. That’s a benchmark, right? That’s a different benchmark than ‘Was it really good?'” So I give a lot of fours where I was like, “Whoa, wow, that was better than I expected.” I don’t give a lot of fives. But with weddings it’s different, because you don’t plan on doing it again. Is this the best wedding you’ve ever had? “Huh? Well maybe for me.”
– Well let me just say this offer, this as a tip, because on Tripadvisor there’s a group of university professors who have been using big data to analyze those. And what they’ve come up with are several answers to questions that people have. You know, what should you respond to? And the answer is you should respond mostly, you should respond first to the negative ones. Because in most of these sites, and you would probably know more about the wedding site, is that once you’ve responded to it, it drops down to the next page so that it leaves more of the top ones up there. But what they also found was that it makes a big difference as to whether or not you’ve got a 1.0 to a 4.4 because then they bounce it up to a 4.5. And a 4.5, it sounds like this is how it works there as well. Then you will get more bookings. People will look at you more.
– Right. So what we find is each site has its own sort default.
– Right.
– On sites like Wedding Wire and The Knot, you can actually highlight or pin a review. Yelp has the same thing. So you can say this is the first review, you’re always going to see this review. And I always caution people, you better update that every once in a while because recency matters. You don’t want that first one being old. And you know, I’ve seen ones that are three, four, five years old sometimes. But in June, I was at this venue out in California and I went and looked on one of the sites and their first review was pinned from 2006, not 16, six. That was 16 years ago. And they haven’t updated because nobody’s paying attention. Yeah. It’s ridiculous.
– And you can’t trust that review.
– You can’t trust it. It doesn’t mean anything. They don’t trust two years ago. They want to know what you did two weeks ago.
– Right, exactly.
– I always tell people the four things that matter for reviews are the number. And when you get into double digits, it feels more substantial. You want to have the score, obviously, you want to have the highest score you can. Although it doesn’t have to be perfect though. It doesn’t have to 5.0.
– No it doesn’t
– 4.5 is fine.
– 4.5, 4.7, 4.8, all of those are still good. And that less than five legitimized all your fives. The third thing is the recency, because they do care about what you’ve done lately. And the fourth thing is the responding. And I know you said you should first respond to the negative. What we’ve been telling people is respond to everything.
– Yes, yes. And that’s very good advice. But if you’ve got to put them in order, you go for those negative ones first, and the response needs to be customized, tailored to the question itself. So many of the reviews that I read that the hotel managers, because that’s mostly what I’ve been looking at. The hotel managers will say, “Well this is very good and I hope you realize we’ve been making changes and that you’ll come back and see the fine job that we’ve done.” But they all say that. I mean they all say more or less the same thing. But some of these people just, they copy and paste.
– Yeah. I personally would prefer on Tripadvisor that you didn’t respond instead of a copy paste, because copy paste means you made no effort there.
– Right, Right.
– If I take the time to post the review, and I think this is the case for many people. If I take the time to post a review, I’m going to post the review that I think would be helpful. So I’m not going to say I enjoyed the hotel, I’m going to say what I enjoyed. I enjoyed the restaurant. No, I’m going to say what I enjoyed. I always want to try to find something good. So if the service was good, but the food was eh or the food was good and the service was, eh, I want you to know, and I don’t say the food was good. I say I had the, the whatever. So, you know, especially I try to eat gluten free. So if like the other day I posted, it was IHOP. And you know, pancakes is in, well not in their name anymore because now they’re just an acronym. But IHOP they have some of the best gluten-free pancakes I’ve ever had. And I’ve been to many IHOPs. And you people are like, “Oh, it’s IHOP.” No, no, no. I’m telling you I need gluten-free. And they have some of the best. So when I post, I post some of the best gluten-free pancakes I’ve ever had. And then I said, “That Jacob was really helpful,” who he was. “This is the waiter,” I posted the other day. But for somebody to post a good review, it has to move the needle kind of way past the middle. Whereas a negative review, even a little bit less, some people might go and do that. Is that what you’re finding over the years?
– Yes. Yeah, absolutely. But then let’s say that Jacob was not so great then, and you specified, I mean you’re a responsible reviewer, so you would probably say Jacob looked like he was overwhelmed. There were too many people. Okay. So then you’d say, you know, you really appreciate that remark and in fact what you’re going to do is get your whole team together so that you could talk about, “What do you do in our restaurant when we get overwhelmed?” So they know that you’ll come back with that because, in fact, you’re kind of interested to know what happened.
– I tell people it’s like you’re not in the room if you don’t respond at all. And somebody, I heard this from the CEO of one of the sites that has a lot of reviews and he said this is more of his conjecture, but from experience that people who respond to the good reviews make the bad review less likely or with less vitriol, because they know you’re going to reply.
– That’s right. Right. Yeah.
– So you’re right, go ahead.
– And there’s always going to be somebody who doesn’t like what you did. I mean, eventually it’s going to be there.
– Yeah. This one the other day was, it seemed like the couple was very happy on the day, but the mother was not happy that she did not not get recognized as much as the mother of the groom. So she took it upon herself to go and do this. Now fortunately, or unfortunately, she did this on a site where you’re only allowed to post a review if you’ve had a contract and paid money to that vendor. So the vendor was able to get it taken down because it actually violated the rules of that site. So, in that case, I said, now that does not, and I told my friend, I said, “Listen, they’re going to take that down and they’re going to keep it down because the mother won’t be able to prove she paid you money because she didn’t. However, that doesn’t stop her from going to another site and trying to do it again. So just be prepared that that might be.”
– More significantly as she tells her friends who have children who are getting married. Those kinds of reports are meaningful.
– What I heard from The Knot and Wedding Wire is that the average couple reads seven to nine reviews per vendor for venues and photographers, and five to seven for all the other vendors. So what that means is, if you’re looking at your page, the way they would look at it, that first seven to nine, those are the ones. If you have not been replying to start there. You don’t need to go to the 50. Or I’m actually doing a webinar for a group in the UK and I was looking at sites and I saw people and trying to show the importance of reviews. And I put up a screenshot of one person who has four reviews and then one that has 26 and then one has 66. They say it’s more impressive. And then one has 1,056. They said, “You know what, that’s a lot.” You don’t need to be there to show people you do a good job because some people do a few weddings a year, some people do hundreds or thousands a year. Let me ask you a question. Let’s dial this back a little bit. In 30 years of talking about this, what has changed and what hasn’t changed?
– Well, I mean, one of the things is what we were just talking about and that is the dominance of these reviews online and how they affect business. That has definitely changed. And I think it’s going to continue to change, because when I read that piece of research by these three professors, I think they were at Harvard, I talk about them in my book and I don’t remember exactly, but I’m pretty sure.
– You read the book a while ago.
– They were able to underscore all kinds of things that people have been asking. But when you’re doing big data analysis, you’re no longer looking at what one person says. And I think the people who are vendors and who are in this industry, they don’t have to worry so much about what one person says. But what is the whole industry learning about this field? And that will come out if somebody hasn’t done a major piece of research on all of these reviews, it will get done, because now that data analysis is there, just about anybody can do that. You can rent time from IBM and get online and do some analysis. That’s significant. And I think what’s also, if I can just add onto that, what’s going to change is what these people also found was that some, for example, a manager, I’m looking at Tripadvisor, of a hotel, they thought that if they were getting a three on a scale from one to five, that that was an okay rating. I mean that’s, that’s not.
– Not anymore.
– I don’t think it ever was. But a lot of people really need to take some time and learn how these websites work. And it sounds like you’re doing a good job at that.
– Thank you. Well as a reviewer and as someone who helps people with reviews and I get reviewed as well. I’m reviewed on Google, I’m reviewed on my books on Amazon, like I’m sure you are as well. They are our brand. I’ve spoken about this many times.
– Yes, right, exactly.
– Branding. Branding is your books. I can see there, you know, behind you. I can see on the table their branding. My logo over my shoulder, you can’t see them, on my shirt there. More people are listening than watching anyway. But branding is that. It’s our logos, our colors, and with consistency with all of that.
– Right.
– But our brand is what people say about us.
– Right.
– That’s what people say about us. When we speak, when we write in my industry here, you know, after they’ve experienced what you do, whether they were the customer or not. because you think about it, the reason you bring two people together for a wedding, for a Quinceañera, for a mitzvah, for a corporate event or whatever. They’re bringing lots of people and every one of those people is reviewing you. Whether they’re doing it officially online or not, or just telling their friends when somebody says, “Hey, how was the party? How was the bar mitzvah? How was the party?” They’re reviewing you. So that is your brand. And one of the things that big data is doing is looking at the words that come up most often in your reviews.
– Yes. They’re kind of like content analysis.
– Exactly. Exactly. Whether it’s a word cloud or however you do it there. I tell people this is an exercise that I want you to do that sometimes we do it where solopreneurs will do it for each other, because you want to take your emotion out of it. You’ll read your own reviews, you’re emotional about it, you read somebody else’s reviews, you can be a little bit more objective about it. But if you read the reviews of somebody else, so do it for your friend, have them do it for you. What words come up again and again? What phrases come up again and again? That is your brand. My brand, entertaining and funny comes up when I speak, but I’m not an entertainer or a comedian. But I’m entertaining and we’re going to laugh a little bit. Actionable content, common sense things. I can use it right away over and over and over and over again. That is my brand. Accessibility. The fact that I’m sitting at dinner with them, sitting at the bar and going on the excursions or whatever. It is amazing how many times somebody will say to me, “Hey, thanks for coming to the party.” I’m like, “Thanks for inviting me.” I could be sitting in my hotel room right now, but instead I’m here at a party with you guys. Plus we learn, you and I learn by sitting next to the people that we speak to, not by standing in front of them.
– So let me add, you said what were some things that we’ve learned, I want to make sure I get it. There’s so many little things that have changed, but there’s a second thing that I think, and this is a little thing, but I’ve noticed it. And that is that it’s really not a good idea to try to reduce the number of complaints. It’s not a good idea. Even the ones that show up on the review sites. because you can respond to that.
– Why is it not a good idea to try to reduce them?
– Because then what will happen, especially if you’re a sole owner and that you’re the only one, you’re the advisor, you’re the consultant, whatever, you don’t have to worry so much about that. But if you’ve got a team of people around you who are helping you with these events, helping you with everything that you do. if you give any hint at all that you don’t want to hear a particular complaint, for example, say that the complaint that starts to show up on these websites is they weren’t precise. They weren’t precise. They missed some of the details. Just as a simple example. And then the owner of this establishment says to the staff, “I am sick and tired of hearing about this, that people think that we’re not precise. I am so tired of hearing about this.” Now what that person may be really meaning is, “We need to fix this.” But that’s not what they’re saying. What they’re saying is, “I’m sick and tired of hearing.” And then what will happen is people, their staff will stop telling them about those things. They will. Because who is their customer? Their customer is their boss. That is really the most important customer.
– So this is market research. I’ve been saying this a long time. I have a friend of mine who works for a big multinational company in market research. And I remember years ago I said to him, “What does it cost to get one of those one way mirror rooms with a room full of people to do that?” And I used to do that. I used to go and be one of those people in the room rating things. I used to, oh, I shouldn’t say this, I used to lie about what I do because if you’re in marketing or advertising or whatever, they wouldn’t let you into there. So I forget what I told them I did, but I didn’t tell them I did that. I wanted to see what it was like. And this is years ago, he said years ago, “It would cost $5,000 minimum to rent that room and get the camera and get the people in and do all that kind of stuff. Minimum. Minimum.” And we get to do this for free every day. Just reading the reviews, reading the things that people write to us.
– That’s right.
– So what you talked about was a management flaw, which is not, I don’t want to hear about it, but how do we reduce these? What do we do together to stop this from happening? Which is management approach. But one of my customers said, you call it a complaint is a gift, which I love that phrase. One of my customers said, “A good customer complains a bad customer just goes away.”
– Yes, exactly. That’s right. The good customer is the one who wants you to get better. Who wants you to fix it. That’s the good customer. And there are just too few of those people.
– Well, and you know, not everybody, again, not everybody has that attitude, which they should, because a good customer complains I want to hear it. I am actually having this situation right now. We ordered, this is going to come out afterwards. My niece is getting married and we ordered custom cuff links for my sons. Because they’re walking my mother-in-law down the aisle, wearing black tie, and they’re each going to have different for their style. And the way that I ordered this on Etsy, it was supposed to be the last name was the big initial in the middle, so first name, middle name. And it came all the same size. I was like, “Well that’s not right.” So I complained, Okay. And she came back and said, “Well this type style you chose is all the same size. It doesn’t come bigger or smaller.” “Where does it say that? Where does it say that?” So I go back and forth without looking at it. Now she’s saying, “Well we don’t take returns on custom items, but I’ll give you 20% off to order again.” Really? No, I don’t think so. So I go back and she shows me somewhere where it said, I was supposed to say, “Lower case initial for the first name, uppercase, lowercase,” to show her how we wanted it. I didn’t see that. So I’m going to take some responsibility for that. But I went back and said, “Really, it’s not really clear or whatever, 20% off seems a little bit weak. I am taking some responsibility.” She came back and said, “I’ll give you 50% off.” I’m like, “That’s fine, that’s fine.” because I realize I missed something there. If I hadn’t missed anything, I could yell, I could scream. No, you know what? Mea culpa. It was on me. So now we’re ordering it again, they come in fine. I’m going to be, you know what, that was fine. I’m not going to go post a bad review for her. Because of that. I will hope that she would update the listing to make it clearer for the next person.
– Exactly.
– Maybe she learned something from that.
– Exactly. And the amount of money that, you know, even if she just said, “Okay, we’ll redo them for you at no charge.” Cool. The amount of money compared to the example that you just said, repeat sending, send me in the room the two way mirror and $5,000. I’m sure that those cuff links didn’t cost $5,000, well, maybe.
– And the point being, would I have felt better if she had said, “Oh, I’m sorry, that wasn’t clear. I’ll redo it.” Yes. Do I take some responsibility for not having, giving it the way? Yes. Should she have come back and said, “Hey, just so you know, that’s not going to be…” Yes, she should have done that. I’m hoping she’s learning something from it. But again, not everybody is you and I. I complain because like you said, I want them to know, because I’m not necessarily looking for, like at a hotel. If I tell you that something’s wrong, it’s not that I’m looking for something free. And I know so many people are. I know that, that’s unfortunate. But I want you to know. And I’ve had some really good conversations with managers of hotels saying, “Hey, listen, you probably don’t know this but, or you should know this, whatever.” And if I see something in my room, I might take a picture and show the front desk. And what I want is acknowledgement. Thank you for letting us know.
– Yes.
– Right? I’m not asking for a credit, I’m not asking for a free night, but I know that they’re kind of on that defensive posture. Anytime somebody complains, they’re probably looking for something free. No, all of us aren’t.
– Yeah. Yeah. Well actually it’s estimated that only about 4% or so actually try to actively cheat. Actively. But managers think about a third of the people are lying when they’re making their complaints. Frontline staff, it’s a much lower number. They believe the customers. Isn’t that interesting?
– Wait, wait, wait. Go back again. So 4% of people are actually actively trying to cheat the system?
– Yeah. That’s the estimate.
– All right, the estimate. So just listen to that. But, we know that those people it kind of digs into you. It hurts more. And you remember those. But the people actually, you know, people in our industry call it blackmail. They’re saying, “If you don’t gimme a credit, or you don’t refund me, I’m going to go post this review.” That’s a really small number.
– That’s a very, very small number.
– Very small number. But managers estimate that it’s a third of people.
– Who complain and probably ask for something. I don’t know if they even do that. But they think about a third of them are just making the whole thing up.
– Okay. But that’s their estimate, not the reality.
– That’s not the reality. That’s right. It’s way outside the reality.
– Way outside the reality and the frontline staff.
– I don’t remember what the number is, but it’s considerably down. It’s like in the 10, 11, 12%, is like considerable.
– That people think that people are just complaining just to get something.
– Yes, that’s right. Yeah. The frontline staff is more, they’re believers in the customers. And I think that that’s true because they’re there with them. Whereas the managers are kind of out here, so they probably are looking at them a little bit differently. I don’t know. That’s another thing that I want to say that has happened is that I think that the researchers now have come to the conclusion that the most important thing that you do is you handle the emotional aspect of this complaint. You’ve got to fix the problem too, and you’ve got to do something with that customer. But the most important thing is you’ve got to address the emotionality of that customer, because that will determine how they walk away. So let’s say that this person that you had the problems with the cuff links that she had said, “I’ll do this for you, but I’m not happy about it.” You would’ve gotten what you would’ve gotten, but you would’ve been unhappy about it.
– Which is kind of where I am. Because if she had just said, “Hey, I’m sorry, normally we don’t take back these things, but it’s not clear. Let me just redo it.” I would feel fine. Because I had to go back and forth. And I have to say that I tempered my language. I wrote what I wanted to say, then didn’t, then I changed it and then went back. And then I said, “Is there something you can do more than the 20%? I’m taking some responsibility for this,” because I know you catch more flies with honey.
– And that’s a really good point that you’re bringing up. One of the things that in my most recent book, I actually wrote a workbook to accompany this. And in there there’s a chapter on powerful phrases to use. And you just said one of them, which is, and that’s somebody delivering something in my office.
– This is live.
– Do, do, do, do.
– Is the power, the taking responsibility.
– I forgot. I lost it.
– Is taking responsibility.
– Yeah, you’ve got to take responsibility. But the point that I wanted to make, I started to make it and then the ding dong blew it right out of my brain. sorry to say.
– That’s all right. Well, so again, so this feeling, this emotion, one of the things that I’ve always found is that the most important thing when somebody complains is that they want to be heard, actually heard. Not just that.
– Yes that’s the emotion.
– Right. Not just that the sound happened, but acknowledge that this heard. So like, again, if I complain about something in my hotel room, I want them to say, “Oh, we’re really sorry about that. Thank you for bringing that to our attention.” There you go. I have been heard. It has been acknowledged. We’re going to let somebody know. There you go. If it doesn’t get fixed, then I have a bigger issue because I told you, you said it’s going to get done while I’m not there.
– Okay, so where I wanted to go was the phrase. And you said something about it.
– I’m taking responsibility.
– Let me see what I can do. This is a phrase that I learned from Apple computers. They say this all the time. If you go into one of their stores and something happens, you want something fixed that wasn’t there, they will say, “Let me see what I can do.” Now that’s a really powerful phrase because what it says is, “I’m not promising that I’m going to do something. I’m not promising that I’m going to give you new cuff links at no extra charge. But let me see what is reasonable here.” And then that person could have come back to you with some, “Here’s what I found is that in terms of our margins on this, I will absolutely lose money if I just make another set for you. I think you can understand that. But I can give you 50%. Does that sound reasonable?” Then I don’t make any money.
– Now, and again, the other side of that, I’ve done things where I’ve lost money to make it right. You know, again, the bigger picture. The bigger picture. Those of you listening who’ve listened for a while, I have another podcast I did, which is called “What Would You Pay to Make It Go Away?” And, it was a story of someone that came to me after they got the bad reviews and that if they had given a refund up front, when the person complained, they never would’ve gotten the bad review. So now they’re standing in front of me asking me, “How do I make it go away?” And I said, “Hey, if I could make it go away, like right now, would you write me a check?” And he said, “Yeah.” I said, “How big of a check?” He said, “Pretty big check.” I said, “Is that check bigger than what the customer paid you?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Oh, today it is. When you had the chance to write the smaller check, you didn’t take it.” So what would you pay to make it go away? So sometimes bigger picture is make it right, do the right thing, make the customer happy. Yes, I might’ve not made money or lost money, but bigger picture, this person is thinking small, they’re not thinking big. And I at this point, I’m like, “You know what, the wedding’s coming up, I need to have these, it’s going to cost me $20 after the discount. Just do it. Get my cuff links, get them the right way.” Don’t worry about it. And again, if it was $200? May be different, $2,000? Definitely different. Because it’s $20 I’m like, “No, I’m just going to do this to get it off my plate.”
– Absolutely.
– But like you said, how do I feel? I still feel like she didn’t do it the right thing.
– Right. And the real question to ask is what’s the money that you’re leaving on the table by not fixing this? You may lose a little bit, yes. That’s the cost of fixing things. But what would you lose if you didn’t fix it? That’s really, what would I lose? And so then that question, “Let me see what I can do.” And what you may be doing is giving yourself a little breathing space so that you can get your emotions under control. And you’re not necessarily angry at the person who brought the complaint, but it’s like, “Darn it, we did this again. We made another complaint.”
– What about asking the customer, “What do I have to do to make you happy?”
– Yes, that’s right.
– What can they do to make you happy?
– Or, what would seem reasonable to you? Clearly our website needs changing so that you can order these more accurately, clearly. We’ll take that responsibility. What would seem reasonable to you? It’s like having a conversation with somebody as a real human being, not as a transactional customer.
– Anecdotally for me, I’ve found over the years that if I’ve said to the customer, well first thing I do is I listen. Tell me what it is. And then I will say, “Is there anything else that you want to share?” Again, emotionally.
– That’s right.
– And some people rewind back to the beginning and tell you again, and I let them go a second time. At the end when I say, “Is there anything else I need to know?” And if they rewind to the beginning, I say, “Okay, I think you’ve told me that twice. Let me just tell you what I think I’ve heard. Then you tell me if I have it right.”
– Right
– Validating.
– Right, exactly. But what they may say is, “Well, I was really upset when I called you, because my father-in-law had just died.” I mean there was all of these back stories that are going on with complaints. And it’s important for you to find out. Can I just say this? I want to make sure that I get this and I really have come to the conclusion that customer service is not what’s going to build your business. It’s got to be there, obviously. But all of these books, if you look on Amazon, rave customer service, raking in customers and that kind of thing doesn’t happen that often, but they have some fantastic examples in their books or in their speeches. But I think the most important thing is to be consistently good about handling feedback and making sure you’re getting it as much as you can. It’s an aspect of customer service, but it’s a separate piece of customer service. And if everybody listening to this says to themselves, “What do I need to do to put complaint handling on the front burner instead of just making it such a fantastic, wonderful experience and I drove in my car a hundred miles to deliver the roses at the last minute.” Those are nice examples, but that’s not what’s really going to drive your business is all that money that you leave on the table because you didn’t handle those complaints properly. It’s a lot of money.
– What about internal, not just customer external, what about internal?
– Exactly.
– Is it the same thing?
– Well I think then we’re weaving back to the manager who says, “I’m sick and tired of hearing about this.” You’ve got to have a structure or a culture inside the company that says we value what our customers tell us. That has to be part of your culture. And that’s part of complaint handling. And that’s why I really do believe that in the future what we’re going to see is that customer service is going to go away on the talking points and complaint handling is going to go up. I really believe that. But I’ve been fooled in the past because when I wrote the first book, the first edition of “A Complaint is a Gift,” I thought, “Well this’ll take care of that problem.”
– If everybody would read it, it would be, right Janelle, there you go.
– Or if they just got the idea. They just got that mindset it would take care of the problem. But it’s not, because there is no way that we’re going to run a business and do it without some kind of issues forming for certain. It’s just not, we’re not perfect.
– And they’re not necessarily of our doing, but they happened on our watch. And when they happen on our watch, we have to take responsibility for them.
– That’s right. Or the father-in-law died. And so that person now comes with a stronger emotionality to whatever it is that you do. And you did that for the last customer, it worked fine. And now for this customer, it’s not, but what’s causing it is the emotional state of that customer. And if you’re not listening, to tie it back to what you said, if you’re not listening, if you’re not hearing what these people are saying, I mean this really is in my mind, the whole essence of what good customer service is. I like to call it complaint handling. It’s amazing to me, Alan, how many people don’t like that word complaint? I was just talking with somebody at a convention I was at and the guy asked me what I did and I told him and he said, “Well, I don’t like the word complaints.”
– What does he call it instead? Feedback?
– Feedback. Feedback. But you see, feedback can be either good or bad.
– Exactly.
– But a complaint is never good.
– Right. A complaint is good because it’s your gift.
– It’s your gift. Yes. But it’s bad information.
– The bad information that you should be happy to receive because they’re giving you a gift.
– Exactly.
– If people want to find out more about “A Complaint as a Gift,” your books are available where?
– On Amazon, they’re available on my website, which is easily enough www.acomplaintisagift.com
– Dot com?
– Dot com, yeah.
– And how many languages is the book in?
– The book in the last two editions has reached 25 different languages. And my publisher Barrett Kohler is now in Frankfurt at that big books show that they hold every year. And they’re selling it there. So this version will come out as well in other languages.
– Well I’m going to put this in the show notes so people can find out more about you. But we could keep talking about this.
– We could talk about this forever.
– And we should, and we should keep talking about this because a complaint is a gift. And it is a gift that you came on and shared this with us today. So thank you so much for joining us, Janelle.
– Thank you. Thank you. You’re a gift.
– Thanks.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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