Don’t Misinterpret the Absence of Customer Complaints
Beware: The absence of customer complaints doesn’t necessarily mean customers are happy.
Consider the case of Stephen, a VP, who admitted that service delivery had been abysmal. There’d been snags, slips, and snafus. Customer complaints had become the norm. “But we’ve made some changes, and in the last few months we’ve had fewer complaints,” he told me. “Things are definitely on the upswing.”
Stephen badly wanted to believe that things were improving. But when I talked to his customers, it was clear they were deeply dissatisfied with service delivery. What customers saw wasn’t the small amount that had been fixed, but the vast amount that was still broken. They would have taken their business elsewhere if they could have, but at the time, they couldn’t.
So, why were customers complaining less? As one of Stephen’s customers put it, echoing the view of others, “After a while, there’s no point complaining any more. It doesn’t do us any good, because nothing changes. So we just tolerate the glitches and make the best of it.” Learning about his customers’ state of distress was a eye-opener for Stephen, and just in time; otherwise, he might have interpreted a complete cessation of complaints as signifying deliriously happy customers.
Complaints are a critical indicator of the state of customer satisfaction, so an increase over time in the number, type, intensity, or urgency of complaints bears examination. And so does a decrease, as Stephen discovered.
But what about the opposite situation: Might an absence of reported problems by happy customers also signify bad news? Absolutely, as Carla, a director, learned, to her dismay. Carla headed a group that functioned as a profit center and delivered services to the company’s internal divisions. One of the divisions had been particularly pleased with her group’s service delivery—or so it seemed, until one day Jeff, the customer manager, informed Carla that he was taking the division’s business to an outside provider. “We’d worked with them for a long time,” Carla told me. “This news was a real shock.”
What happened?
Carla’s team had made the serious mistake of taking this valued customer for granted. Though her staff had at one time maintained regular contact with the customer, they had let their attentiveness lapse. They mistakenly concluded that there was no need because everything was going well, and Jeff would surely let them know if there were any problems.
When Jeff concluded he needed to lower costs, he contacted other providers to evaluate their pricing options. No longer being treated as special by Carla’s group, he never asked them to bid. So Carla’s team never had the opportunity to compete for the business they already had—and would now lose.
Beware the absence of customer complaints. It may not signify what you think.
