Customer complaints, dissatisfaction Ned Roberto Ardy Roberto Philippine Daily Inquirer
October 22, 2009
QUESTION: WE HAVE FOUR three-star hotels. We’ve tried to differentiate our hotels from the competition by attending to customer satisfaction. But we can’t afford to get an agency to do the customer satisfaction survey, so we do things by ourselves.
To monitor customer satisfaction, we rely on customer feedback that we collect when guests check out or after they eat at our hotel restaurants.
We read your series of columns on customer satisfaction. We liked your idea about focusing on customer dissatisfaction because, as you said, that’s where the opportunities for competitive advantage lie. So what we did was to modify our customer evaluation form by encouraging expression of complaints.
We now have weekly reviews of the week’s tabulated complaints and we asked the operations group to do something about the top complaints. We noticed, however, that over the past five to six weeks, the number of complaints did not go down. There was even a slight increase! Is there something wrong with our system?
Answer: Focusing on customer dissatistaction is the right thing to do, especially for those businesses where customer satisfaction level has stabilized at a high 70-80 percent. We are guessing that this is probably true in your case.
You are also right in saying that it’s from customer dissatisfaction that you can quickly spot opportunities to differentiate your hotels from the others. That’s because everybody else in your industry is likely doing the same thing.
Now, if you’re after cost-effectiveness in managing customer dissatisfaction, your monitoring and sourcing of customer dissatisfactions from customer complaints is a good enough approximating source, at least in your industry.
Your hotel guests and hotel restaurant diners get dissatisfied right where you are. That’s unlike in consumer goods where the satisfaction and dissatisfaction experience is in the homes of consumers or places far from you.
Patience
You asked if there’s something wrong with your complaints handling system. The first thing for you to realize is that there are many forces at play, accounting for why your customer complaints did not go down and even went up.
To start with, don’t you think that five to six weeks is a rather short period to expect even ordinary results, not to mention dramatic ones which you seem to be looking for?
Be patient and give what you’re doing the chance and enough time to work out.
Unforgiving customers
There’s a second significant factor to consider. That’s your segment of served customers in today’s tough economic times.
Your hotels have probably more of what a previous service customer segmentation column of ours referred to as “multiplicative” or unforgiving customers as against those who are “additive” or forgiving ones.
Yours is a service industry where overall customer satisfaction comes from at least three components of service, namely, satisfying service staff, a satisfying service venue and facilities, and a satisfying service processing.
An “unforgiving” customer is a highly demanding customer whose satisfaction comes from your satisfying all of their expectations—you fail in one component and you fail in all.
That’s why we termed their satisfaction as “multiplicative.” If you score 100 in any 2 of the 3 service components but zero in one, the resulting product of the three is 100 times 100 times zero equals zero!
Forgiving customers
In contrast, a “forgiving” customer gets its satisfaction additively. Taking the 3 scores in the preceding, this customer’s overall satisfaction equals 100 plus 100 plus zero or 200! That’s two-thirds or 67 percent of the total 300.
So overall, even if you fail in one, there’s still high enough satisfaction if you’re okay in the other two.
In hard times such as what we are currently experiencing and for a hotel business, you will tend to have more of the unforgiving, rather than forgiving, customers. They are the more complaining and angry type.
So expect a rising number of complaints.
Managing complainers
Lastly, we’d like to say something about how you manage the complainers.
You mentioned that you tabulate the weekly complaints and “for the most mentioned of them (the top 3 or 4), asked the operations group concerned to do something.” That’s managing things in the right direction, but it’s not enough.
You have to manage two sides of the complaint population: the total as well as the individual. Your current system is directed at the total and it’s efficiency oriented. To respond quickly and as widely as possible, you get operations to do something about “the top 3 or 4 most mentioned” complaints. That’s of course better than not doing anything or doing something at random.
But you have to also do something about individual complaints. What exactly can you do that will matter to the customers but without unnecessarily tying up your company’s costly human resources time? You may want to benchmark against and learn from how Hewlett-Packard (HP) in the United States responded to customer complaints.
We once heard from an HP executive who was an AIM student of the senior MRx-er that each customer complaint that HP (US) receives gets assigned immediately upon receipt to a Customer Service (CS) staff. It then becomes the responsibility of the assigned CS staff to contact the complaining customer, discuss the complaint, and if found with merit, solve the underlying problem.
Each CS staffer then files a written report on each managed complaint. The CS staff’s compensation and bonus are calibrated against resolved complaints, among others. Our source tells us that the entire system worked well.
It was simple, easy-to-implement and cost-effective.
(Thanks for your questions. Keep sending them to drnedmarketingrx@gmail.com or marketingrx@pldtdsl.net.)
