Why customers love to complain

>>by Peter Niemeyer

Complaining, complaining, complaining...more and more people are complaining about everything. Seth Godin states in his Blog that "we b*%§# and moan about a Facebook redesign, when it's a free service; we can't wait to get our hands on the new 3G iPhone, but dogpile on Apple when free software upgrades don't appear quickly enough for our taste; and we wring our hands over Amazon's customer service despite the company's free, speedy delivery." Although there is always room for constructive criticism, many people tend to make themselves unhappy only for the sport of it.

But why are we doing this?
-Because we perceive ourselves as individuals who deserve attention and the best possible value. As our satisfaction depends on the interplay between our expectations and the value we perceive, we are constantly raising the bar.  We love it, when our expectations are exceeded and are barely satisfied when our expectations are met. Through increased market-transparency coupled with multiple channels to vent our anger, we are empowered to ask for more, and we have the right to be unhappy, to be heard, valued, and even worshiped. 

For a marketer, unhappy customers are difficult to handle. If a company reacts to all its (relevant and irrelevant) customer complaints by offering ‘more', its customers tend to want still more than that, often reaching unreasonable amounts that are economically absurd. If, on the other hand, a company does not react to complaints at all, its customers will become even more dissatisfied, migrating towards competitors. To solve this catch 22, it is important to point out what people really want: "connection and meaning and belonging and love"[Seth Godin's blog]. A well managed relationship between company and customer is a key advantage to achieve this. Instead of blindly reacting to the one or the other complaint, a company should implement a system, which displays customer input from various communication channels, thereby identifying critical (most relevant) customer demands that can be tracked and followed up.

The company-customer communication often suffers from the "one-way-street-syndrome" where the communication flow is not mutual and impedes an effective dialogue and/or the "one-size-fits-all-syndrome" where communication is standardised because of misleadingly assuming homogeneity in demands. In a world where customers are empowered and tend to be unhappy about the smallest things, both syndromes have to be avoided. Today's customers not only require an individualised communication, but also the opportunity to share their opinions about their experiences. In fact, today's customers want to be part of the process, they want to be heard and to be taken seriously.

Across different touch-points between customer and company such as face-to-face meetings, telephone-conversations, email-traffic, or conventional mail it is of a major importance to install convenient platforms for the customers to share their complaints and to rate their overall satisfaction. As mentioned before, these platforms should be connected by an integrated system that permanently keeps track of their input, enabling the company to asses the individual causes of complaints and react to them. The entire system should be dynamic and update itself on a regular basis. Through that, a new dimension of customer-company communication can be achieved, triggering a learning spiral that helps to constantly evolve the value proposition on a reasonable basis.  The beloved customer feels connected and valued by the company which in turn generates a certain feeling of belongingness to the company.  

The sport of unhappiness is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as one understands its true meaning: the cry for involvement and increased communication of an evolved customer-base. Companies should face this challenge and evolve their customer communication systems. Managing customer experiences that are strongly shaped by complaints respectively the reactions to these complaints will become essential for future business success.