A customer who complains is a customer who has bought, although our attitude towards him rarely reflects this recognition. It is not a prospect that we must pursue: it comes to us, communicates and gives us the opportunity to prove how much we are interested in continuing to choose us. He bet on us to usefully satisfy a need and, therefore, a correct handling of the situation that he poses is the exam that we must take to retain it.
When measuring the costs involved in solving a complaint, this fact is often forgotten. How much would it cost us to get a substitute client if the current one is lost ? How much would it cost us to incorporate other clients to replace those that we will lose in the immediate future due to their bad references? This is the true measure to evaluate the costs of resolving a complaint, which are never limited to direct costs.
But I want to go even further: when we receive a complaint we are benefiting from the most qualified opinion that we can obtain about the effectiveness of our organization. It is enough to examine our processes in the light of the customer's opinion, which thus becomes our most strategic partner, the most interested in our continuous improvement and the one who is willing to continue contributing his ideas for life, without charging us a single peso.
However, from the point of view of any entrepreneur, complaints are viewed as something that shouldn't happen - a kind of genetic abnormality that you had better cover up for us to accept. They are the exceptions that were not in the plans, because they always appear at the least appropriate time and place. An attempt is made to convince the client that their annoyance is unfounded, that the organization did things well, that what happened is due to "causes beyond our control" and that "it will not happen again" -although no background justifies this last statement.
In many cases this happens because, really, things do not go well and it is preferable to minimize the problems so that the client does not feel that he has chosen the wrong supplier. Perhaps due to the absence of planning, limited resources or personnel with little competence for the task, the fact is that sometimes we are forced to distort what has really happened in order to retain a client. All this, being an everyday and understandable reality, is undesirable and its resolution should be part of our immediate objectives.
En otras ocasiones, todo sucede como fue planificado pero el cliente no lo siente así. Son las que sustentan la polémica frase “el cliente no siempre tiene razón”, aunque resulta ilógico suponer que alguien viene a quejarse de algo que ni siquiera teníamos previsto hacer. ¿Quién querría perder el tiempo de ese modo? Solo alguien que fue inducido a creer que lo reclamado estaba implícito en lo que se compraba, ya sea por la publicidad, por la acción de ventas, por los asesores del producto o por alguna otra fuente de similar legitimidad. Son las quejas virtuales, de las cuales somos tan responsables como de las reales, aunque no siempre lo asumimos.
Either way, a complaint represents the challenge of handling a stressful situation whose consequences can be unpredictable. We have little preparation to face an annoying client, both from an operational and communicational point of view, because whoever attends a complaint rarely knows the company's procedures in sufficient depth to immediately understand the situation and be in good condition. to resolve it in a satisfactory way, and neither does he master the basic techniques of empathy, managed from the non-verbal.
And even if they had that knowledge, the contact officer often feels caught between the client's anger and the limits imposed on his actions by management. He knows that there is little he can do, because the causes of the incident are far beyond his reach and the priorities of the hierarchy are other. His only way out seems to be to drag things out, making excuses.
The alternatives are few and almost always ineffective, because there is a lack of a methodology that allows understanding and managing this phenomenon in a professional way, while the management literature has contributed little to shedding light on the matter. By leafing through it, we can verify that a good part of it reiterates ideas that are otherwise groped, without added value, superficial or obvious, until bordering on the ridiculous.
As a natural consequence, recipes don't work as expected, and the problem keeps getting bigger. It is something similar to the misdiagnosed patient, in whom medications only produce new pathologies instead of healing them: they end up thinking that theirs is incurable or much more serious than they supposed, when in reality they may be being the victim of malpractice. If he survives, he may realize that the solution was to change doctors.
The functioning of organizations has so many similarities with the human body that not a few authors have given in to the temptation to propose management theories that replicate our physiology to implausible levels. Soon, some of his colleagues add the qualification of "anthropomorphic" to these theories - as if it were pejorative - and they go to the other extreme, developing unnatural models that could only be happily implemented by automata. Not so much, not so little. The analogies should stop at the precise moment that we have avoided reinventing the wheel.
Therefore, it is necessary to resort to the concepts of General Systems Theory (TGS) and its main exponents, to understand that organizations should respect the functional principles of an open system to neutralize their entropy and remain viable as adaptive entities. The teachings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (TGS), Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics), Humberto Maturana (Autopoiesis), Ross Ashby (Law of Necessary Variety) and Stafford Beer (Viable System Model) provide us with the basis for developing a more advanced model, in which a real-time feedback loop about customer perceptions completes the continuous improvement cycle that begins with identifying your requirements.
Complaints thus become part of a larger system. They stop being something unexpected to become a natural consequence of what, having been promised, was not fulfilled. And they rely, to detect the client's perception, on those forgotten non-verbal communication skills that used to be our only way of contact with the outside world before speaking and that we gradually lost due to the wrong formal education.
Nothing simpler, then, even if to achieve this we must completely change the closed system paradigm in which models as conspicuous as that of the ISO 9001 standard have flourished. We can continue to do the same or risk exploring that territory, so unknown to many., which is human perception. It depends on us.
