A 1994 survey by IDEAS (Innovative Approaches to Deliver Excellence through Improved Customer Practices and Total Quality Service) identified five strategies that companies use to create strong internal service cultures. These strategies are all based on the assumption that a culture in which employees are treated with respect and enjoy their work will be passed on to customers.

 The five strategies include:
 

• Employee communication that reveals employee needs and measures levels of employee job satisfaction;
• Training and reward programs that recognize service excellence;
• Service standards that are determined by input and feedback from both customers and employees.
• Supervision that ensures these standards are practiced; and
• Responsibility by senior management for developing and maintaining a service culture.

 Companies that follow these practices enjoy a higher percent return on sales compared to companies that do not create strong internal service cultures. In addition, these companies experience lower employee turnover. They find it easier to attract new employees, and, therefore, enjoy a higher quality of employees. These companies also have stronger reputations in the community; repeat business is the norm.

 Companies that are successful at creating strong internal customer cultures also benchmark their performance against their competitors and against leaders in a variety of fields. Smaller companies not have the resources to do this in an extensive manner, but they can all review their own human resource practices to determine if they support the five strategies. They can also survey their own staff to see how their staff feel they perform on these dimensions.

 It's interesting to note that there was no specific mention of complaint handling in these five key strategies. At the same time, it is easy to see where complaint handling would fit under each of these strategies. We suspect that if the survey were repeated today, some 5 years later, that complaint handling would be more precisely mentioned.

 When A Complaint Is a Gift was published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers in 1996, the book was the first of its type on the subject of complaint handling. Today there are several books on the subject, and Barnes and Nobles actually has a category called complaints/customer service books.
 

Janelle M. Barlow, Ph.D. 
Coauthor, A Complaint Is a Gift, Using Customer Feedback as a Strategic Tool
 

Previous "Complaint Is A Gift Corner" pages: 
 

#1	Overselling Service
#2	Not Listening to Complaints
#3	Plastic Chicken
#4	Complaints You Can Do Nothing About
#5	A+ Complaint Handling
#6	Beware! Others are Watching You
#7	At Least Keep Talking!
#8	Let Customers Know You'll Tell Someone
#9	If You're Going to Apologize, Then Mean It
#10	Keep Front-life Staff Well Informed
#11	Don't Set Goals to Reduce Complaints
#12	Products Used During Special Events
#13	Best Practices of Complaint-friendly Organizations
#14	Complaints About Mother Nature!
#15	Socially Offensive Situations
#16	A Complaint Is a Gift in Action
#17	Information Systems  Users' Complaints, I
#18	Information Systems  Users' Complaints, II

We invite you to submit your "best" examples by fax or e-mail. We won't print any company names with the "poor" examples, because we believe that every organization fails from time to time. We will give credit to companies delighting their customers. In the case of the "poor" examples, we'll comment on how we think this situation could have been handled better. If you want us to list your name, please tell us that is what you want to do.

A Complaint Is a Gift, The Training Program 

A Complaint Is a Gift, The Book

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

tel: 702 939-1800

fax: 702 939-1804

email: 

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