Principle 3: Customer Perception of Value (Item 3)
Providing what your customers value – now and in the future –
must be a key influence in your organization's direction, strategy and
action.
You should actively seek customer complaints and use them to make better
products and services by removing dissatisfiers.
Customer complaints are gifts. The old way of doing business is to
make the complainant go away. The new way is to think, "here is
a gift, new knowledge. How can I make use of this to make my processes
better and give my organization competitive advantage? How can I change
what I do so that customers never have cause to make complaints about
this issue ever again?".
The customer is telling you directly what it is they do not like. Most
organizations just make the complaint go away by fixing the problem
for that customer. You must go further. Treat each complaint
as a system failure. You are going to make sure it never happens again.
Go further again. Use the complaint to modify your product and service
so much that what was cause for a complaint becomes a benefit.
An important issue in complaint management is prompt and effective
resolution. This can lead to a complete recovery of customer confidence.
In fact, it can lead to very loyal customers.
You must examine the cost and benefit of making system alterations
to fix the complaint. Some issues that your customers complain about
are too expensive to fix or not possible to do. However, you must do
what you can.
You should also prioritize what you work on so that you address the
causes of most complaints with the smallest changes necessary. Effective
elimination of the causes of complaints often involves aggregating complaint
information from all sources so that you can evaluate it and decide
what to do next to get most improvement. 
Your complaint management process should include analysis and priority
setting for improvement projects based upon cost of the complaints,
cost of fixing their causes and benefits that will come to you because
of increased sales due to customer retention, loyalty and attracting
more customers.
Many of your customer's complaints will have their origins in your
own policies – how you decide to do things. You make and control
those policies and can change them. Policy changes are usually easy
to do and can have huge positive impact on your customers.
Customer complaints are so valuable that you need to encourage customers
to make them. That's right! You need to create an environment where
your customers feel that they are an important part of your business.
Only then will they take the time and effort to give you the feedback
that you need to create value for them. If they feel they can trust
you to act and the product is important to them, your customers will
ensure that their expectations about quality, delivery and price are
clearly communicated to you. If you are not seeking and getting clear
complaints, you are missing jewels of wisdom.
You should place emphasis on obtaining `actionable' information from
your customers' comments and complaints. By actionable, we mean that
the complaint should clearly point to the business processes you need
to change. It is up to you to examine the cost/benefit of making the
change.
You should ensure that your managers and employees who look after your
processes receive the complaint information so that they eliminate the
causes of complaints. This must be done in a way where there is no hint
of blame. People don't usually deliberately do things that cause complaints.
You need joint problem solving to improve things that have gone wrong.
Not a climate of blame.
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