So why a blog called Thank You for Complaining? At the heart of any process improvement, a leader needs to think about what their customer experiences. It takes courage to look at complaints and feedback and determine how they may actually help you become stronger and better as an organization. Many complaints that you read or receive will not feel very good. In fact some of them will feel really bad. It can be difficult to read a letter that tells you how your team failed. It can be very uncomfortable to realize that you have responsibility for somebody else’s pain and poor experience. But, when you have the courage to look at these issues and identify ways you can change, you started your journey towards improvement.

Have you ever read that Google review, you know the one where you got one star? The complaint often starts with, “I give zero stars but it wasn’t an option..” Have you ever looked at a yelp review for your organization? Has it made you want to grab your keyboard and fire back in response, “you don’t know what you’re talking about?” Have you ever listened to a customer review your organization on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn? How about the phone call you receive directly from a customer? The one where you’re forced to listen to your customer go through in agonizing detail how you and your team failed? And the most frightening of all? The letter. The hand written, painstaking, 6 page kind. The one that you can tell was carefully written, each word carefully thought out, and penned by somebody who is truly angry.

Much of my work has been in the healthcare arena. For many years, I worked closely with patient relations and risk management in a large, tertiary care healthcare facility in the Detroit area. We processed literally dozens of complaints and issues every day. Some days were very difficult, but I continue to do the work I do because I felt that something I did today could prevent a patient from being hurt or having a horrible experience tomorrow. It was what got me out of bed in the morning. It was what I went to sleep thinking about at night. In my heart I knew that there were things that we could be doing to change our systems and structures so that these events did not happen again. My journey into process improvement as my life’s work began by reading complaints, listening to feedback, and realizing that these people were giving us a gift. They were telling us what they really think.

Let’s pause for a moment, as I need to specifically address healthcare complaints. Serious complaints, especially those that are in writing, must be responded to in accordance with the conditions of participation with CMS, and in order to be in compliance with the standards of the Joint Commission. Be aware, that failure to respond back to a patient in a timely way, in writing, can land you in very hot water with both of these regulatory agencies. Any person who takes the time to write you a letter, should have a written response in return any timely way. It should go without saying that any business, healthcare or otherwise, needs to take written complaints, in letter form, very seriously.

When a customer complains, they deserve appropriate service recovery. You need to hear their complaint. You need to apologize. You need to try to make reparations. And the most important thing to consider is how you can assure them that this will never happen again. That’s the place where we usually fall down. And the purpose of this blog is not to dictate acronyms for service recovery, methods for apologizing to customers, or crafting the perfect response letter. We will include response letters, but what we really focused on is how you change your work so this never happens again. More importantly, how do you change your organization so this never happens again?

Mid-level managers, directors, team leaders, vice presidents, C-suite officers, and leaders of every flavor must deal with customer concerns every day. The meetings and time spent dealing with specific concerns can suck up an inordinate amount of time. How much time in those meetings is spent beating up on the “crazy” letter writer? Or pointing fingers at a lower level employee who doesn’t have training or tools to provide a great customer experience? Is there the meeting where the Executive says, “This can never happen again!” and then leaves the team to try and figure out how to manage? Are there 2 or 4 or 8 more meetings to fine tune the response letter back to the person who complained? And where are you at when you receive a variation on the same complaint from a different customer just a week or a month later? Was all your effort spent on crafting the perfect response, but no effort spent on looking at what contributed to the failure in the first place?

Be very careful of the “Blame Game” with your team. It is the rare occasion that an employee deliberately sets out to provide horrible service to your customers. If your first reaction is to blame a person for a customer complaint, you are missing the point here. People want to be successful in their work. They want to do a good job and feel productive. If they are trained to perform poor processes when they hire in to their job, they will continue to perpetuate poor processes every day because they have been conditioned to understand that is what the organization expects of them. If a leader does not insure that their team has proper training, tools and time to do their work, that is on the leader, not the worker. If you are the leader, you have a responsibility to understand the work that your team performs, the processes they are trained to, and to critically evaluate if those processes are delivering value to your customers. That means changing how you look at complaints. That often means changing how your team does their work and leading them to understand, contribute and appreciate regular review that makes their work better. That means changing how your organization does its work. And it means applying a methodology to improvement to ensure that these changes stick.

There are a variety of methodologies to choose from. Lean, Six Sigma, PDCA, Change Management, CAP, GE Workout, Hoshin Kanri, TQM, are some of the toolsets that exist. Each methodology has tools and tricks that help to measure and improve processes. The purpose of this blog is not to make you an expert on every toolset; the purpose of this blog is to show you how specific tools can be used and have been used to address actual customer complaints. The intention is to help you as a leader consider what you can and must do to change your work and to change the work of your organization, so that you have satisfied customers who are sending you positive feedback, instead of unhappy customers sending you complaints.

Our goal with this blog is to write it in such a way they you can see yourself in the stories we tell. Many of the complaints that we choose to talk about are based off of feedback from real customers. Names, locations, organization names, leader’s names, and other identifying information will be changed to protect the innocent. Many of the concerns that are raised are issues hospitals, clinics, call centers, and other businesses experience every day. These complaints are often left to mid-level managers to deal with. A mid-level manager is one of the busiest people in your organization. They manage your staff, they interact with your customers, they make sure people are on time, they make sure that things go as best they can. And they’re the ones that have to deal with the difficult situations. We hope that some of the tools, scenarios and suggestions in this blog can help you to think about how work can be changed so that complaints are not so regular and not so severe.

I know you hate getting complaints, but think about it. While your customer may not be happy, they actually like your business enough to tell you what they think. If you can turn that complaint into a win, by showing them you’ve changed how you do your work, you’ll have a customer for life. When I say you need to think about complaints differently, what I’m saying is that you need to be grateful for the feedback your customers are willing to give, even if you don’t like it. Most of your customers just walk away and don’t come back. The one’s who take the time to tell you what you need to hear are giving you something very valuable: the ability to improve! That’s why we say, “Thank You for Complaining.”