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Preventative Complaint Maintenance:
How to Keep Good Clients from Behaving Badly

Sarah is a general sales manager. The phone rings in her office and its Harriet, a production supervisor at one of her best clients.

Harriet is very upset because she just found out that she has to rerun a $40,000 job, and has a deadline looming. Apparently the product sold to Harriet’s company by Sarah’s company was not to specification. During this highly emotional interaction, Harriet complains that this is the third such shipment that was not to spec.

This is the first Sarah has heard of this. Sarah’s mind begins to race as she tries to compose an appropriate response. Sarah wants to see if she can help fix the problem and repair the service error. Without warning, Harriet asserts that they will find a new vendor and hangs up the phone before Sarah can respond.

Is This a Bad Client or a Good Client Behaving Badly?

The difference is critical. You want to limit your work with bad clients.

  • Bad clients, you can never please.
  • Bad clients will always blame you for factors within their control and outside of yours.
  • Bad clients will endeavor to make their pain, your pain.

You want to increase your work with good clients, even if they behave badly, or more to the point, unproductively.

  • Good clients will build agreement with you.
  • Good clients will own the factors they control.

But when they have exhausted all resources for resolving their issues, good clients will also endeavor to make their pain, your pain.

You can provide your good clients with a system that will allow them to make their issues known to you before they cause them pain. Call it preventative complaint maintenance.

Do not infer from this that complaints are bad. Quite the contrary, you want the feedback. What you do not want is the visceral, infuriated feedback that manifests itself in threats and accusations. Angry, threat—filled complaints are what a good client will do as an absolute last resort.

They key to avoiding furious exchanges is to make sure the client has plenty of options for making their needs known to you. Your clients do not want to get angry. They do not want to have service problems. While they understand that human error can interrupt the most finely tuned operations, they will not tolerate continued problems.

Your clients act out by use of threats, or anger, or accusation when they feel as if they have no other options. They seek to make their pain your pain when they do not want to feel pain anymore and you are the most convenient vessel for theirs.

To put it simply, good clients will treat you badly when they are out of options for resolving their problems with your product or service.

People, including your clients, make emotional decisions. Confronted by a problem, your clients ability to manage a problem rationally, as opposed to emotionally, is based on the resources they have available to solve the problem.

The more resources, pathways, and options they have for bringing resolution to what troubles them, the less likely they will resort to fight or flight strategies that are the most basic resources humans have for negotiating threat.

In a business context, an example of flight might be resignation. An example of fight might be accusation. Of course, neither are positively correlated with sustained, mutually—beneficial client relationships.

Your clients address service issues in an era of the ubiquitous use of call-screening technology. Designed with cost savings in mind, these systems not only pass on the cost of feedback to your clients, their omnipresence has conditioned your clients to believe that their opinion is unimportant.

Even if your company still has caring, compassionate humans answering the phone, you will still have to overcome the inertia of dismissal that is a byproduct of the usage of automated call-screening.

How can you provide your clients with easy options for bringing issues to you before they become larger problems? Here are a few suggestions:

Assign Liaisons

People are more inclined to disclose with humans than they are with faceless entities. Provide your customers with a face to relate to and information will flow more freely.

Give Point of First Contact the Power to Resolve

Make certain that whomever your client sees first has the power to resolve their problem, or appropriately routes your client to the person who can. If there is a routing protocol, make sure that no later than the second person your client interacts with acts as ombudsman.

The ombudsman should resolve all remaining issues without asking for further client effort. Make the customer service call as barrier-free for your client as possible.

If you have people in the field who are in direct contact with your client, make sure they have the skill, power, and incentive to immediately solve your client’s problems.

Maintain Routine Interaction with Different Contact Points Throughout Your Client’s Enterprise

When it comes to fielding complaints, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. But, are you appropriately responding to the squeaks that are not yet loud enough for you to hear? Make sure you have multiple routine contacts with various points throughout your client’s enterprise.

Meet with senior management. Meet with line managers. Find ways to take the pulse of the line personnel who are directly affected by your service or product. Make it part of the service agreement. Understand the needs of your customer, the current and future needs, and you will have the information needed to be proactive in your service to them.

Make It Easy For Them To Give You Feedback

Your clients are people, and most people are uncomfortable with conflict. Enough so, that they will routinely put it off. They will set aside what appears to them in the present to be small issues. As those issues repeat or become more pervasive, your client will slowly grow more dissatisfied in silence!

Your clients will only complain when the pain of the problem becomes greater than the pain of complaining. Then, to you, the complaint will appear out of context with your experience of the service history.

Remember, they have been conditioned by their experience with other companies that their feedback has no value to you. You will need to help your clients overcome this conditioning.

Find ways to reward and thank them when they provide feedback. Make sure the issues they raise are resolved to their satisfaction. Celebrate the success. Write them a note of thanks and, if the complainer is not the decision-maker; offer to send a copy to their direct supervisor.

Your Clients Will Practice What Works

When emotions are high, rash decisions and broken relationships are a likely result. Emotions are less likely to run high when your clients have ample opportunity to make their needs known, and responded to.

When your client experiences resolution through their behavior, whatever that behavior might be, they are more likely to utilize that behavior the next time they have an issue. It is in your mutual best interests that you have procedures in place to respond to positive, proactive behaviors before your clients are left with their last resort.

Happy Client Retaining,

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© 2004-2007 Jeff Simon Consulting. All Rights Reserved. Wouldn't you love to peer into your client's head and know what they are thinking and feeling? Could you have better success at keeping and choosing your best clients if you could decode their behavior? Check out the Happy Clients Newsletter at: www.happyclientsnewsletter.com.

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