Complaints, Complaints, Complaints
Customer service is the backbone of business
Does anyone recall the movie Gremlins from 1984?
The plot of the movie is about a father who is looking for a Christmas present for his son and ends up buying a small and furry creature called a mogwai from an antique store in Chinatown.
He is warned about three important rules:
- Do not expose the creature to bright light
- Do not let it come into contact with water
- Never let it eat after midnight
⚠️ Movie spoiler alert
When any of the above occurs, bad things start happening.
If the sunlight doesn’t kill them, a midnight snack will transform the cute cuddly mogwai into a monster gremlin and water will make them multiply.
Christmas is totally ruined by the evil gremlins!However, today’s post isn’t about movie nostalgia, but customer complaints.
Excited? I am.
Let’s go!
Customer experience (CX) is linked to growth
I was initially planning on leading with the famous iceberg/complaints analogy in the introduction to this post, but decided to go with the Gremlins theme instead. In any case, let me briefly recap it for you anyway for wider context:
“Complaints represent only the visible part of an iceberg. Concealed beneath the water surface are the remaining unsatisfied customers who haven’t spoken up.”
The overall idea with this analogy is pretty useful and it makes business sense. Here’s an interesting scientific fact: 10% of the iceberg is visible, whereas 90% of the mass lies hidden beneath the waves.
We can learn a lot from this observation and construct when it comes to identifying and managing underlying customer unhappiness.
Although, to my mind the iceberg analogy also conveys stillness — perhaps there is an assumption about a static or slow-moving nature of business complaints.
When I was doing my undergraduate degree many moons ago, I recall the following facts about the importance of customer experience in one of the Marketing classes.
A happy customer will tell 5 people about the good experience they had
An unhappy customer will tell 20 people about the bad experience they had
Wow! In the eyes of a 20-year-old student, this felt truly enlightening to learn and the concept has always stuck with me since.
Nevertheless, going back to the reason I’m leading with the Gremlins analogy is that I want to convey the message that when complaint handling goes wrong, things can start going south very quickly.
What is a customer complaint?
Some might think of a complaint as a formal letter from a customer that clearly states “Please treat this as a complaint”, an email communication with the word “COMPLAINT” written in caps in the subject line or perhaps an irritated customer who requests to speak to the manager in charge.
Complaints are not always labelled as such, so you need to learn to spot the signs.
Here is how the world’s leading dictionary publisher is describing a complaint:
The second phrase is the one that most aligns most to my own definition of a complaint:
A complaint is the expression of dissatisfaction.
What you need to pay attention to as a business decision-maker is that there is a fine balance to tread when setting your own definition of a complaint in your organisation and the parameters for capturing and logging complaints.
To understand this concept, just look at some of the similar words used above to picture how this would be treated in a complaints logging environment.
Customer objection? → Complaint
Customer criticism? → Complaint
Customer nitpicking on your newly launched product? → Complaint
There are two business scenarios that I specifically look out for when reviewing a company’s complaints data:
If there are zero complaints
If there is very high ratio of complaints compared to overall customer volumes
Both situations require some further analysis to understand root-causes, whereas typically the best companies out there will find themselves somewhere in between.
When analysing a company’s complaints data, start by looking carefully at their definition of a customer complaint. Next, look at the operational processes for how complaints are captured and logged in the data. The answer to these two questions will very much influence the complaint volumes and the KPIs that are being reported.
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Why customer complaints is a good thing
It can be difficult and tough to deal with customer complaints, let alone acknowledging that they are there in the first place.
Complaints are an opportunity to improve and grow as a company. To make our products and services stronger and better. This is why managers need to adopt a growth mindset and embrace complaints as an important source of information and insight that will help to create a better business future.
The more customer insights you can gather, the better off you’ll be. When a customer complains, they will speak their absolute truth and there is no holding back. Getting this kind of honest and transparent feedback is a goldmine of information for your company.
The key here is not just about resolving the immediate complaint at hand, but to look one step deeper (beneath the surface) to figure out the root causes behind the complaints.
“Your most dissatisfied customers are your greatest source of learning.”
— Bill Gates
Customer service is the backbone of business
I want to go back to the Marketing textbooks and think about where those stats I told you about earlier actually come from.
An unhappy customer who has a bad customer experience will tell up to 20 people about it. That number of people might represent situations where the complaining customer are telling their friends about their bad experience over dinner, phone calls or perhaps over a coffee chat.
What has happened and changed since these textbooks were originally written many moons ago?
Amongst other things: technological advances, the internet and social media.
I’ve never seen any updated statistics on how these good vs bad customer experience dynamics play out in a today’s highly digitised world and where consumers can reach vast volumes of people on social media with the click of a button.
In this wider context, think about the wider implications and importance of your customer experience programmes, complaint handling and customer service.
On this note, I will end with a suitable reference to what we have covered today by referencing probably the most impressive customer complaint about poor customer service in history.
“United Breaks Guitars” is a protest song by Canadian musician Dave Carroll and his band, which retells the story of how his guitar was broken during a trip with United Airlines in 2008 and the subsequent uncooperative reaction from the airline.
Carroll posted the video on YouTube on July 6, 2009 and it amassed 150,000 views within one day, prompting the airline to contact the musician.
It was also reported that within a month of the video being posted online, the company’s stock price fell 10%, wiping out shareholder value of about $180 million.
(Source information: Wikipedia)
15 years on, the video is still going strong and it has 26 million views and over 600k likes as of February 2025.
Hope you found today’s newsletter useful and enjoy the video!
/Jens
The comparison between unhappy and happy customers and how many customers they bring or how much you can lose should show anyone interested in growing their business how important good customer service is. Great article Jens!
Good insight 😌 Can i translate part of this article into Spanish with links to you and a description of your newsletter?