Don’t complain about complaining customers – they are good for your business!

Everyone knows the real truth – the customer isn’t always right.

This doesn’t mean that you can be annoyed, frustrated or dismayed when customers complain about your product. How else are you going to find out the faults, bugs or annoying aspects of your product or service. Your customers not only provide you with a revenue stream but are also the greatest test base of what your product or service. The emergence of social media as a media channel has led to a number of high profile incidents of organisations ignoring complaining customers (have a read of our thoughts on the infamous “United breaks guitars”). You just can’t stick your head in the sand in 2010.

Susan Payton, President of Egg Marketing & Public Relations, has written a great post on Mashable on why you should value and learn from complaining customers. Great things can come from listening to your customers. Not only resolutions to help improve your customer retention, but new insights that can lead to a better service offering or the tiniest change to a customer experience that moves it from good to great. One of the techniques we use to wake up organisations to what its like to be one of their customers is called Customer Mirrors – we literally take participants on their own consumer journey so they can actually experience the everyday customer experience that they offer. Not every organisation will have the chance to use Customer Mirrors or a similar technique, so what’s the best thing that they could start doing right now?

Listen to your complaints and be glad that you’re getting feedback. More importantly, see this as an additional opportunity to provide a great customer experience.