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Dealing with Information Systems Users' Complaints, II
Probably no other department in an organization receives as many complaints as the Information Systems (IS) department. Because of the constant pressure of customer support, complaints must be seen as an opportunity to improve system quality, to learn, and to deepen relationships with customers. Otherwise, complaints are quickly perceived as a burden. As a result, customers will sense that their calls are unwelcome to the IS staff. Many of the same guidelines about handling any other kind of complaint applies to an IS department. However, there are unique aspects to IS complaints. Last month we covered ten aspects in the Complaint Is a Gift Corner. Be sure to visit our archives so you can catch the first half of this article. This month, we look at the balance. These ideas are presented in no particular order. • Complaints are inevitable with IS because of the complexity of the product. IS personnel must understand that complaints are not an attack on their own abilities. Complaints are a logical conclusion of the implementation process. Systems rarely meet all the user's requirements. Indeed, many requirements not have been requested by the user team or manager. • Complaint legitimacy must be carefully handled. Some computer complaints are undoubtedly without merit. IS personnel must be careful to not leap to such conclusions when a complaint is first presented, but by careful questioning find out what is "legitimate" about the complaint. They could also help the user to see that the IS department can do nothing about the problem, nor is it even the IS team's responsibility to handle certain types of problems. Emotional sensitivity and clear communication is strongly called for here so the IS department is not seen as shirking responsibility. • IS staff generally have long-term relationships with users. Consequently, it is vitally important that complaints be handled well, without rancor and hostility, because the complaints be a relatively small part of the total relationship. If a complaint is handled poorly, however, the entire relationship become confrontational. Respect is critical for the foundation of a relationship between users and IS staff. • When users complain, they come from their total history of being computer users. It is tempting for IS staff to try to limit the discussion to the events at hand. It is important, though, to remember that the customer shows up with their complete experience. They are less likely to be event focused, as the IS staff would prefer to be. IS staff have to know how to gently guide the user back to the issue at hand. • Users show up with tremendously differing levels of experience and computer competence. This can make them either more cooperative, or quicker to blame. The challenge for IS personnel is to treat each user as a completely fresh case. • Many times the solution to an IS complaint is more training—in other words, the solution represents a greater burden to the complainer. How this is sold to the complainer is critical. It has to be seen as an opportunity, rather than the IS department avoiding responsibility. • Complaint handling for the IS department contains a huge component of education. Users must be educated as to the boundaries of what can or cannot be changed. They must learn that for the IS team to fix problems, they have to know about them. So, part of the education process involves teaching users how important it is to complain. • Finally, users need to know what problems they should attempt to fix themselves, and which ones absolutely need to be brought back to the IS team. We know of all too many instances of where user fixes have created major long-term problems that don't get discovered until other major problems have resulted. One way to educate users is to let them know up front there are four categories of problems: It could be helpful for IT staff to look at all the complaints and questions brought to them and mentally categorize the issue into one of the above categories. Once the IS staff feels comfortable with their ability to rapidly decide which kind of complaint or question is being brought to them, they could then share this system of categorizing problems with their customers. In this way, customers already begin to do some of the work of resolving their problems on their own. This information is based on the work of Barbara L. Marcolin and Christopher A. Higgins, "Effectively Dealing with IS User Complaints," Journal of Systems Management, Vol. 43, No. 12, December, 1992, pp. 29-36. Janelle M. Barlow, Ph.D.
Note: We have been getting e-mail from our readers asking us to list the names of the companies who get complaints. Our policy is to never list names. The reason for this is because every company fails from time to time, and we wouldn't want to tar some company's name just because of one bad example. Furthermore, we are dependant upon the writer's side of the story. We don't know for sure what happened, and in the name of fairness, we will not post names. Furthermore, the purpose of this corner is not to pass complaints along to corporations. This Complaint Is a Gift corner is designed to look at examples of good and bad complaint handling so we can learn from these experiences. Please, if you have a direct complaint you want a company to learn about, contact them directly. In many cases, we have never heard of the company in question and have no idea how to reach them. Janelle Barlow |
  
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