There are few things that I appreciate more in life than writing a complaint letter. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m looking for opportunities to write them, not at all, it\u2019s just that the opportunities where they are required just keep on arising and when the rage of injustice is bubbling within, the only thing that seems to quell the anger and move the mind from madness to proactive positivity, is constructing an (award-winning) letter in response.<\/p>\n
I was triggered to write this blog after reading tweets from Assistant Professor at St John\u2019s University of Law, NY Kate Klonick<\/a> who posted her 5 page (2021 so 5 frame screenshot) complaint about her car rental saga over Thanksgiving weekend. \u00a0You can read the letter here<\/a>. \u00a0When her ordeal had nearly come to an end (at considerable expense) and she was finally given a rental car to drive to her family for the holiday, her partner asked her whether she wanted to drive.\u00a0 She replied,<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d .. \u201cI have a complaint to write.\u201d<\/p>\n I feel you Kate.<\/p>\n The letter writes itself in your mind even whilst the terrible experience is occurring. It is no surprise to me that she\u2019d whip her laptop out and start furiously typing as her partner began the long drive, desperate to begin to cleanse the ordeal from her brain, making sense of what happened and reaching out into the ether to hope that someone understands and says that they are sorry. \u00a0I wouldn\u2019t have been able to enjoy Thanksgiving with THE LETTER ping-ponging about my head – the act of pressing send more powerful than a finger striking a return key, more like the slam of a \u201cLET RIGHT BE DONE and I shall now kindly go about the rest of my day, NO THANKS TO YOU OR YOUR ORGANISATION SIR\/MADAM\u201d.<\/p>\n Kate\u2019s letter of complaint is particularly interesting to me because she writes it as someone who understands the law.\u00a0 I write letters of complaint as someone who understands improvement and service experience, which is an excellent place from which to write a letter of complaint, but not quite from the same place as someone who is able to assert when and where contracts have been violated. \u00a0I can say things like \u2018that\u2019s breaking the law!\u2019 but as in the case of this weekend when I challenged 5 young women who were on the Tube in a global Omicron pandemic MASKLESS, I\u2019m not entirely sure what the law actually states? Pretty sure Sadiq Khan said you have to wear one anyway. (I got 3 and a half of them to put their masks on. The most confident one who argued back didn\u2019t of course and her friend who sat next to her put one over her mouth only. And that was on loosely so as not to smudge lipstick. Sigh.)<\/p>\n There were so many problems with Kate Klonick\u2019s experience that I don\u2019t even know where to start so I\u2019ll just skip to the end. \u00a0A telling sign of systemic organisational sickness is when companies make it really difficult to make a complaint. \u00a0As they did in this case when she finally found the page to make a complaint, the entered form triggered a 404 internal server error. Easy to keep complaints down if you’re not able to make them.<\/p>\n In fact, and I\u2019ve not tested out this hypothesis, perhaps a good acid test before making a significant purchase with a company would be to see whether their website easily lets you know how you can make a complaint if you need to, and doesn\u2019t just lead you to a broken web link. Of course it’s also quite important to not only be able to send your complaint, someone has to meaningfully respond to it too.\u00a0 As someone with a clinical need to construct letters of complaint after a terrible experience, it\u2019s actually quite surprising how many companies make it exceptionally difficult to formally complain. I mean, I get it on one level, let\u2019s not prioritise complaints over our core business, but on the other hand, they are an inevitable reality of most organisational systems. You might as well treat them as a process in themselves, a really important process that can make dissatisfied customers even more loyal than they would have been without the problem occurring in the first place.<\/p>\n Indeed, complaints are such powerful catalysts of change for organisations. They are pure \u2018customer voice\u2019. They tell you where improvement is needed and dealing with them so that the same situation doesn\u2019t happen for other customers can lead to a seismic shift in customer experience.<\/p>\n You might also avoid someone sharing the terrible experience across 13k retweets and 53.5K likes on Twitter, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, the New York Times \u2026 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are few things that I appreciate more in life than writing a complaint letter. 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