What can a solitary campaign achieve? « Campaign for Customer Entitlement

What can a solitary campaign achieve?

Posted in Debate by Kalwant Ajimal FRSA on April 11, 2008

For a start, customer service campaigns are never solitary. There is always a group of seemingly undervalued and unrecognised people known as ‘the customers’ who step forward and expect to be acknowledged. I know of at least three managers who spend a great deal of their time in dealing with customer correspondence relating to service complaints but they are not able to link the feedback from customer correspondence about their needs and expectations with the opportunities they could create for upgrading service delivery. There are five challenges for these managers:

How to skillfully handle customer complaints
How to ensure that the same complaints are not repeated everyday
How to train other staff to deal with complaints – do you want to employ the world’s highest paid complaints handler because a director does not trust his own staff to deal with ‘irate’ customers?
In keeping with number 2 above, how should the organisation learn from existing complaints to the extent that it is able to integrate improvements into the delivery mechanism? The alternative is to keep on dealing with the same complaints repeatedly.
How to learn from other service organisations.

There will be more discussion on how to address these opportunities. What would also be useful is to discuss how service providers should avoid being reactive when things go bad. Good complaints avoidance programmes should be strategic, ongoing, continuous and be based on open communication. Simple? Not really. We hope to bring you a few examples of success.

The Campaign for Customer Entitlement is nothing new. There have been many commentators and analysts in the past who have campaigned on behalf of the customer. The popular media features to customer complaints against service providers on a daily basis. It makes even better copy when they name and shame service providers. However, in extreme and justifiable cases this may be the only alternative.

Tagged with: customer complaints. shaming service providers, learning from experience

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