By Oluwole Dada
Most organizations do not truly know what they believe about their customers until a complaint arrives. Mission statements are aspirational and marketing campaigns can be curated. However, the moment a customer pushes back expressing his frustration and disappointment, the process that responds reveals the organization’s actual values.
The self-check organizations must do is to ask how quickly actions are taken when complaints are made, and how quickly does someone take ownership of the problem. This process of responding to customers should not be seen as administrative but as an operational activity that determines whether customers return or disappear permanently.
I believe complaint handling is the single most revealing process in any service organization, and it can confer competitive advantage if it is made effective. It reveals, more clearly than any marketing campaign or mission statement, what a company believes about its customers and about itself.
Every service business receives complaints because no organization delivers perfection consistently. The differentiating factor is how they are handled when they arrive. Does the organization treat the complaining customer as an inconvenience or as someone who cared enough about your service to tell you how it had failed them?
The Ritz-Carlton complaint handling process is one of the most studied in global hospitality. Every employee, regardless of role, is empowered to spend up to $2,000 to resolve a guest complaint without seeking management approval. Meanwhile, the more important element of the process is what happens after resolution. Every complaint is logged, analyzed, and reviewed in a daily operational briefing. The purpose is not for accountability but for learning.
The Ritz-Carlton treats every complaint as a signal about a process failure somewhere in the service delivery chain and uses it to improve that process before the failure recurs. The result is a brand whose complaint rate is among the lowest in the industry and whose service recovery satisfaction scores are among the highest.
In contrast, the collapse of United Airlines’ brand equity in 2017, following the forcible removal of a passenger from an overbooked flight, was not simply a public relations failure. It was a process failure. The airline’s overbooking and bumping process had no adequate escalation pathway for the scenario that unfolded. The complaint handling process that followed appeared to defend the procedure rather than acknowledge the customer.
This significantly amplified the damage. United’s stock lost approximately $1 billion in market value within 24 hours. A broken process, and a broken complaint response to it, cost far more than the cost of fixing the process would ever have been.
Organizations must not wait for a crisis before they audit their complaint handling process. Ask these questions today: how does a customer complaint enter your system, who owns it, what is the expected response time, how is the resolution confirmed, and what mechanism exists to learn from it. If any of those questions cannot be answered clearly, you have so much work to do.
Waiting Times
I have spoken about waiting times in the earlier part of this series, but I want to revisit it here in the specific context of process design, because the source of the waiting time problem is almost always a process problem, not a staffing problem. When customers wait too long, the instinctive organizational response is to add more people, more tellers, or more agents.
Sometimes that may be the right answer, but often, the waiting time is not caused by insufficient people. Waiting time are often caused by a process that has unnecessary steps, manual tasks that should be automated, or approval chains that were designed for a different era of the business. Adding people to a broken process produces a slightly faster broken process. It does not solve the underlying problem.
Toyota’s lean manufacturing philosophy, which has been applied extensively in service industries, introduces the concept of muda (waste).
In a service context, waste is any step in a process that consumes time or resources without adding value to the customer. Toyota’s approach is to map every process step, identify which steps create value and which create waste, and systematically eliminate the waste.
Banks, hospitals, logistics companies, and retailers that have applied lean principles to their service processes have achieved dramatic reductions in customer waiting times not by adding staff, but by redesigning the process itself. The UK’s National Health Service applied lean principles to patient flow in several hospitals and reduced average waiting times by over 50% without increasing headcount.
Your process must put the handling of customer complaints into consideration and reduce customer waiting process to the barest minimum.
Oluwole Dada is the General Manager at SecureID Limited, Africa’s largest smart card manufacturing plant in Lagos, Nigeria.
