ICEBERG

As shown by research conducted by DSEF in 1982 and TARP Research in 1999, the customer who complains to a business is just the tip of the iceberg. For every customer who complains, there are 25 others who are dissatisfied but do not complain. However, each one of them shares their unpleasant experience with 10 others, and those in turn with 5 other people each. The conclusion is that for every customer who complains, 1560 people will hear an unpleasant story about us and our business.

The complaining customer is valuable because they give us the opportunity to see what we did wrong and correct it, so that we stop creating dissatisfied customers. This is why many businesses around the world invest significant resources in learning about their customers' complaints early on.

How do we treat a complaining customer? First of all, let's be clear that in the first phase it doesn't matter who is right. If we see our mistake, we sincerely and visibly apologize, both as individuals and as a business. As the old technicians used to say, "the intelligent person admits, the cunning person justifies, the fool insists." If we are right, it is pointless and harmful to insist on proving it to the customer at first. The only thing we will achieve is to hurt their ego, lose them, and turn them into a source of our defamation. The important thing now is to show empathy. In other words, to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and try to understand how they are feeling. Why are they saying what they are saying and in the way they are saying it?