The Complaint Line Effect

Not being able to identify when your organization is experiencing this dangerous cycle sets you up for a series of unpleasant consequences.  Here’s how you’ll spot it.

A healthy customer feedback system engages customers at all times and in a variety of ways.  Your customers are already grading you, after all.  You just need to ask them to share that information with you.  And when that happens the result is that you’re looking at feedback from a nice cross section of your customers.

But the process of consistently asking can break down for a variety of reasons.  Turnover at home office, people get busy, something becomes a big priority.  The bottom line is that the means of asking customers for feedback falls short for a while. 

The Complaint Line Effect.  The result is what we call the Complaint Line Effect.  Those customers who have a great experience which they’d like to share aren’t reminded to do so.  Customers who have an axe to grind, however, will continue to find your guest satisfaction survey to share their concerns.  As traffic in your feedback channel drops and complainers become a disproportionately large percentage of traffic, your “customer grades” drop.  

Here’s an example.  In this case, turnover at this company’s home office created a period of time when their regular means of asking customers to share feedback – website, signage in their restaurants, their email club – fell by the wayside.  Their average grade is calculated on a trailing 30-day period so as the weeks went by and traffic continued to decline it dragged their average customer grade underwater with it.

Why is this important?  Most companies take some form of customer feedback seriously, and their managers and corporate leadership are used to seeing these grades in one form or another on a regular basis.

Failing to recognize that satisfaction metrics are dropping because the profile of your feedback traffic has changed can cause morale to take a hit, especially if there are other challenges that your organization is facing.  This can also create wasted time as your team works to address illusory drops in performance.

Worse, if left unattended this situation can create the perception that a higher than usual percentage of complaints is normal.  And that can be poisonous to any culture of service.

Next week: How Companies Make the leap from Complaint Line to Feedback Loop.