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Customer frustration is something we’ve all experienced and can relate to. When it happens to us we’re more likely to tell our family and friends about it than complain to the people who can really fix the problem.
That’s exactly why when a customer, client, guest, or patient complains about something it’s a terrific opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade and Janelle Barlow tells us how.
What You’ll Discover About Customer Frustration:
Janelle Barlow, author of A Complaint is a Gift
* Why the pressure of reducing customer complaints creates vanity metrics
* The mindset service reps need to truly reduce customer frustration,
* Why businesses fail to see customer complaints as opportunities,
* How to avoid the compassion fatigue that results from dealing with customer frustration, and
* MUCH more.
Guest: Janelle Barlow, PhD
Janelle is an award-winning speaker, trainer, consultant and author who translates research into practical tools to improve customer service and complaint handling.
She works with Customer Service Representatives, managers and entire companies, both nationally and internationally, to help them recover and retain customer loyalty.
She has recently released the third edition of her bestseller (more than 275,000 copies sold to date), A Complaint Is a Gift: How to Learn from Critical Feedback and Recover Customer Loyalty.
Related Resources:
If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our other [archive link] episodes.
Contact Janelle and connect with her on LinkedIn.
Visit her website.
Check out her best-selling book, A Complaint is a Gift — now in it’s 3rd edition.
Download her FREE article: Actually, We Should Want to Hear Customer Complaints
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The Smartes Way to Transform Customer Frustration into Satisfaction with Janelle Barlow
Customer frustration is something we’ve all experienced and can relate to. When it happens to us, we’re more likely to tell our family and friends about it than complain to the people who could really fix the problem.
And that’s exactly why when a customer, client, guest, or patient does complain about something, it’s a terrific opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade. But exactly how are you supposed to do that? My next guest can tell us how. Stay tuned.
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Welcome to Business Confidential Now, the weekly podcast for smart executives, managers, and entrepreneurs looking to improve business performance and their bottom line. I’m your host, Hanna Hasl-Kelchner, and I have a fascinating guest for you today.
She’s Janelle Barlow. Janelle helps customer service representatives, managers, and entire companies, both nationally and internationally, recover and retain customer loyalty. She holds a PhD, is an award-winning speaker, trainer, consultant and author who translates research into practical tools to improve customer service and complaint handling.
I love the practical aspect of that. Now, Janelle has recently released the third edition of her bestseller, A Complaint is a Gift, How to Learn from Critical Feedback and Recover Customer Loyalty. And she also has a free download for our listeners today that I’ll tell you about at the end of the show. So, welcome to Business Confidential Now, Janelle.
How are you? Thank you, Hanna. Thank you very much.
I get a sense, Janelle, that customer frustration is rising, now that more companies seem to be pushing people away through automation, whether it’s voice mail, greetings that say, “Wait times are longer than expected. You can check our website for frequently ask questions,” and of course, your questions not there.
And then there’s the chat box that’s generated by dumb artificial intelligence, that again, doesn’t understand misdirects, miscommunicates, and it’s just another hurdle for you to jump through before you can reach a live person.
And sometimes, never mind businesses like Facebook, where you can never reach a live person. What’s going on, Janelle? Why, in your experience, do so many organizations create an add to customer frustration.
Because it saves them money. I mean, that’s the bottom line on all of this technology, that is just not available to everyone. I think anybody who’s tried to call an airline, today, they’re becoming less and less available. Some of them are just simply not taking any telephone calls.
And that’s a real issue for people, because sometimes you need to talk. Your situation is complex and you need to talk through it with somebody. There may be a simple answer, but you don’t know it. And I think these companies are throwing customers away. I like to put it as they’re leaving money on the table.
They spend all the marketing dollars to get people, and once they’re attempting to call you, why wouldn’t you talk to them in person? And really, the only reason is, is that it’s somebody in finance has made a decision that they’re going to save money by cutting out any sort of person-to-person contact with the customer.
Well, that’s not too smart, is it?
I don’t think so. I think, eventually, we’re going to get to the notion, the understanding that this doesn’t work, the same way that a lot of companies came to the idea that having everything manufactured in China and then we have the pandemic and then we have all the logistical problems.
Companies don’t even have goods to sell, in many cases, and they’re beginning to realize that that’s not good in the United States. Now, many companies are starting to bring manufacturing back to America, and that’s probably a better idea. It’s going to cost them a little bit, but it’s going to keep customers.
Well, keeping customers and avoiding customer frustration is really what we’re here to talk about. In your experience, what are the most common ways that organizations mishandle customer complaints and increase customer frustration, besides the technology?
Yes. Well, one of them, a very personal level, is they script those people who answer the phone. And I think somebody thought, “Well, if we’re just going to script them, we might as well put it on some sort of a recorded…” – or a bot if it’s on a chat, and that just doesn’t work.
I’ve been noticing lately when I call with issues and can get through to somebody, many of them, everything that I say – “What’s your name?” and I say Janelle Barlow, and they say, “Perfect.” and I want to jump in and say, “No, that’s not perfect, that’s just my name.” “Where are you calling from?” and I tell them, and then they say, “Perfect.”
On occasion, I say to them, Have you been told to say “perfect” to everything the customer says to you? And they kind of nervously giggle. Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening. “Perfect” is one of the phrases. They’re using a number of statements like that.
And it annoys me because I didn’t call to have somebody tell me that my conversation with them is perfect. That’s, I think, one of the ways, it’s too much scripting. I mean, my gosh, we pay these people money, we train them, and then they script them.
I just it frustrates me. If you hear the frustration in my voice, it’s like, “Ah.” Another thing that happens is that they don’t empower those people that you’re talking with. Let’s just say on the phone, to make things easier. They don’t empower them to really handle your issue. They’ve got to move on to other people.
Now, I understand in a company, the high-tech companies like Apple, if you’ve got a problem with them, you go through it, they try everything at the entry level telephone call, they try to help you handle that. If that doesn’t work, they immediately send you up to a higher level person with greater technical skills.
And if that doesn’t work, it goes up another level. So, they’re triaging these telephone calls, and that’s not a bad thing to do. But there are some simple things that they could do, and many of them are not empowered at all. And that’s a problem.
And let me tell you a third one, Hanna, and this one is one that many companies, I think, don’t really understand, and that is that they try to set targets to reduce complaints. Now, the only thing that that does is whoever is getting those complaints at the front line desk, the customer-facing person, they’ve been now told that they want a reduction in the number of complaints.
And what they will do is they’ll simply not pass those complaints on. And then, what the company does is they don’t get that valuable information that tells them you’re going to lose customers if you don’t make some changes. They just don’t pass them along.
And I’ve had so many company managers and heads of companies say, “You know, I like your idea of a complaint as a gift. I like that. However, we want to get to the point where we deliver perfect quality service so that we have no complaints.” And I say to them, “Do you realize what planet we are living on? This is called Earth.”
I mean, every day is filled with challenges and problems and issues. Every day, everybody. So, to think that you can get rid of all those complaints is just ridiculous. All you’re going to do is reduce the amount of complaints that you hear about, not that you’re reducing the complaints. So, those are three things that companies are doing. There’s a bunch more, but that’s three of them.
That last one just blew me away. Janelle. I mean, I understand the goal of wanting to reduce complaints, but by ignoring them, by papering them over, it sets it up as a vanity metric that really doesn’t have any meaning. And, you know, it throws open the door for competitors to come in and fix what you’re not willing to fix because you’re too busy looking in the mirror.
Exactly, exactly. And then, many of these companies that are really big and they have different offices in different cities in various places, and they give rewards to the managers who can reduce the number of complaints. One manager told me that they tried that and they lost a whole bunch of their customers because people just couldn’t get through to them. Nothing was being fixed.
Every time they called, it was the same problem. And he said, “We began to realize what we were doing to ourselves. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot when we do this, just to have good numbers to send up to corporate offices.” There’s a lot of foolish, silly things that go on.
And then, when you get a new manager or a new head in the corporate offices, the same problem appears, because people don’t really fully understand what complaints are all about, and that is it’s a chance to talk with the customer and help them move out of the state of dissatisfaction. That’s what it is. It’s an opportunity, it’s a gift.
It is a gift, it’s just I think so many people are afraid of dealing with customer frustration because they fear a backlash, and maybe they just haven’t been trained in and how to appropriately address complaints. What do you recommend?
Well, I think that’s true, and I recommend starting with the mindset. And the mindset is that we don’t need to get defensive when somebody gives us a gift, when somebody gives us a complaint, what we need to do is to listen, really listen to that person, attempt to solve it as best that we can. And I really think you have to thank them.
That’s what we do when we get gifts we thank people, even if we don’t want the gift. If somebody gives us a birthday gift and it’s not what we want, it’s the wrong size, it’s the wrong color, we think, “Oh my gosh, did they buy that at a dollar store? Did they buy it at a – did they buy it used?” We’re going through things in our mind.
But even when that happens, when somebody bothers to take the time and trouble to send you a message or send you an actual gift, what we say is, “Oh, thank you. How nice. You really shouldn’t have. That’s wonderful. That’s just great.” You know what I mean? We reward that person who gave us the gift because it’s polite behavior and it’s something that we learned when we were small children.
Children don’t thank people when they get gifts unless their parents are there. They nudge them and say, “Come on, say thank you to your auntie, say thank you to this – to your friend.” And eventually, the children begin to say thank you when they get a gift. And then the adults around them, they smile, and they reward that little child for saying this, and then the child tries it again, and eventually, it becomes part of the mindset.
When somebody gives you a gift, you say, thank you. And then we get into business and we get complaints and we don’t see that it’s a gift. And there are so many reasons why a complaint is a gift.
Number one, being that it tells you what you need to do to keep that customer with you. They’re telling you about something that you probably didn’t know yourself, and that’s a gift.
But what about the factors that keep people from seeing it as a gift?
It’s a very embedded mindset, and that is when somebody attacks us, we need to get defensive. And I remember, once, working with a company and we did a one-day program, and we practice a whole bunch of times, what do you say when somebody gives you a complaint ?
I mean, we practice giving each other complaints. And then the other person would say, “Well, thank you so much. That’s really nice of you to call and let us know about that.” And then, I’ve got a three-step process that people should go through. So, people would go through that.
So, at the very end of the day with this particular group, I said to them, “Let’s try one more.” So, I chose somebody from the group and I said to her, “There’s something wrong with my whatever,” and she said – she looked at me genuinely and she said, “I don’t handle that. You’ll have to call this other department.”
And the whole rest of the room just burst into laughter, because they knew she had not gotten – she just didn’t get it. After a whole day of talking about this, she reverted to her “I don’t do that. You have to talk with somebody else.” And unfortunately, that’s what happens. It doesn’t make the customer any happier to hear, “You’ll have to talk with somebody else. I’m not the right person.”
Well, how do you even accept that answer? “Just get me a person,” you know?
Right, Right.
Get me somebody to talk…
Maybe they still could establish rapport. “Oh, thank you so much for calling. We want to help you. I’m going to fix this. I’m not the best person to do this, though. I know somebody who can. And this is their…” – there’s a way to do that smoothly so you’re not just hitting the customer in the face with the point of, “They’re not going to get any help from me.”
Yeah, exactly. It’s like, “Call back. It’s not me.”
“Call back, call anybody, but don’t call me.”
Yes. You laugh. I worked with somebody once who had an assistant who did that. “He’s not in the office. Call back.” It’s like he just wanted to cringe. It’s not very helpful.
See, that’s just such an ingrained response, to not take responsibility, to put it back on the – we get very defensive when people give us negative feedback. Very defensive.
And that’s the foundational aspect of being able to handle complaints, is you’ve got to see whatever they say to you, whatever. I once was giving a speech and people were asked to write comments, and one of the comments that I got on the written feedback was, “She’s too tall.”
Well, I’m almost six feet, but I can’t do anything about my height. I’ve tried. Maybe getting older, I’ll shrink a little bit in size, but I can’t do anything about that. Now, here’s what I did with that. I wasn’t talking with this person, but I thought this is a chance for me to really look at my own mindset about that feedback. My mindset went like this, “Okay, she’s complaining about my height.
She knows I can’t do anything about that. There’s something else that bothered her about the way I spoke, the content that I had. There was something else under that,” and that is frequently the case. The customers will complain about this, but what’s really going on is something else.
“I’m complaining to you because this happened, but what really bothers me is that I had two other telephone calls where people were trying to get me through to the right person, and that’s what’s led me to a state of frustration. And now I’m talking with you, a live person, so I’ll take it out on you.” People do this. It’s what we do as humans. The customers have a right to complain, they’re giving us their money.
That’s right. And whether you have a product or a service, whatever the “it” is, it’s to help make somebody’s life better and easier. And so, when they have a hiccup, you’re not really fulfilling that mission. So, we talked about the automation and the lack of human connection.
Even if you get a person, they just blow you off. Now, how can organizations create a more human connection in dealing with customer frustration?
That comes back to the mindset, and part of it, I think, is that we have to look at this person who’s come to us and understand, let’s just deal with the reality that sometimes these people are – they’re not nice people and they’re going to take it out on you. That’s a different matter altogether. You’ve got to protect yourself in that.
But let’s say that somebody is coming to you and they’re deeply frustrated. I mean, something as simple as they bought something and they were supposed to have batteries for it, and now they’ve given this present to their grandchild and they didn’t get any batteries for it and now the grandchild is upset about it.
This is a human being who is experiencing some kind of anguish, and if we can touch into that humanity from one person to another. Hanna, I have met people who are really tremendous complaint handlers, and part of it, I can feel, is they just wake up in the morning with love for their customers.
I mean, the bottom line is that I’m going to help these customers. I want to keep these customers. And if we don’t, we’ll tell them, “Go someplace else.” But if we want to keep those customers, what’s the best way to keep them is to show them that we’re valued, and that our conversation needs to reflect that. And when we receive a gift, our conversation needs to reflect that.
You helped us out by telling us something was wrong. And Hanna, the research is clear on this. If you help customers, a huge percentage of them will come back and be even more loyal than they were when they had the problem.
I believe that. And especially today, because we talk about more and more customer frustration. So, imagine somebody does what they say they’re going to do.
This is shocking in this day and age, because so many people get ghosted, they get ignored, they get pushed back, they get called a Karen or whatever other derogatory name. And you’re right, there are probably some people who deserve that, but for the most part, you’ve got somebody who’s saying, “Help me, please.
I don’t know where to go next. I’m not a techie. I don’t know how to fix this. This is broken. It happened at the worst time. What do I do?”
“And I feel ignorant and stupid because I’m having to call and ask for help.”
Yes.
So we really need to treat these people with kindness. “Oh, this is how you fix it. You just do this.” And they didn’t know that. They didn’t. That doesn’t make them stupid.
It means that they’re learning the technology or whatever it is that they’re learning about.
Right. Because…
It’s an opportunity for us to – there really are some simple little words here, like kindness and being nice, and if that’s in our hearts, if that’s in our – it’s going to show up in our voices, and the customer is going to hear that, and then it’s going to settle them down.
I recommend that when people first get a complaint ,that among the first words that get used are “thank you.” “Thank you” is a really powerful phrase because it sets up a communication chain.
And the communication chain is if I say thank you to you, then your natural tendency is to say, “You’re welcome.” I mean, that’s just what we do in our conversation around the world. And the moment that we have that kind of a chain going on from me to you to you, to me, and it’s nice language, it’s respectful language, it’s caring and listening language, that customer settles down.
I’ve watched this happen, literally, hundreds of times. They settle down and then it makes it easier for you to talk with them as well.
Janelle, in your experience working with all of these people on the front lines dealing with criticism aimed at the company, well-meaning, and really, a gift and disguise, I understand.
And I can imagine that there comes a point where they’re dealing with complaint after complaint after complaint, that they experience compassion fatigue, and they’re tired of repeating themselves. I mean, if you go to the post office and they rattle off, “Do you have any flammable blah, blah, blah,” they say it’s so fast you can’t even hear the words.
But because they’re tired of saying it and it’s necessary, they can repeat it in their sleep, and I’m sure that some customer service representatives can at times, feel the same way with “Ugh, this is the same question over and over again. I’ve answered it a hundred times,” but not to that particular customer, to them it’s new.
That’s right, that’s right.
How do you recommend they keep their mojo up to be able to maintain that compassion when – they’re human too, and they can get tired of it.
Right. Yes. They need support. They need support from their colleagues who are doing a good job at this. But they also need breaks. They need time to sit down and get away from that. They need to see the humor in it. And they certainly need their manager’s support, and they need their colleagues’ support. They need that.
My hairstylist was telling me about a situation where somebody was talking with this woman, and this woman was, “You effin stupid, this…” – and I’m sure she was really swearing at her – “I’m never coming back here.” And it ended up she walked out and left, and then the manager came over and said to the staff person, “What did you do to make her act that way?” Well, that’s not really supportive.
People aren’t your staff – this is another part of it, if you lose your customers but you also lose your front line customer help. You lose them too because they think themselves, “I’m not going to put up with this anymore.” And so, we all need to get into the mind frame of we’re talking about a delicate subject here, namely dissatisfaction, and your job is to make it work.
And it’s possible that working 12 hours a day is too much, or all these telephone calls that get routed to the Philippines or India where it’s the middle of the night when they’re talking with you, they must get very frustrated with – I mean, they’re tired.
We need to look at the person who’s taking the calls is the person who’s going to solve the problem. We need to make it possible for them to solve the problem. And people typically need support when that happens.
I like the way you phrased that, “Make it possible for them to solve the problem.” And the example that you just shared where a manager comes up since – basically, is making a judgment, “What did you do to make them angry?” That’s just not helpful.
Before we wrap up here, Janelle, I’m curious about your book. A Complaint is a Gift, How to Learn from Critical Feedback and Recover Customer Loyalty, now in its third edition, which is terrific. What changes in the marketplace regarding customer frustration inspired you to update that best seller?
A big part of it is what’s going on with online complaints, because those are becoming much more predominant. The person can write anything that they want. They don’t have to deal with a live person standing there in front of them. Sometimes it really make some strong and negative statements, or they’re frustrated and they go back and then they really blast the company for that.
I don’t think we fully yet understood how this works. We do know this, there are some things that we know. We know that almost everybody is – like say, to a hotel. You’ll check out that hotel on the website. You’ll see what the Yelp ratings are, you’ll see all the different platforms are that handle hotels. People are doing that.
Now, companies have to realize that this is the reality in the world, and what’s the best way to respond to those online complaints. Hanna, I tell you this. When I wrote the first edition of this book, I honestly, naively thought this book would solve that problem. People would learn how to handle complaints, they would go away. I mean, the issue of complaint handling would go away, and they didn’t. They didn’t.
And so, about 15 years later, I wrote the second edition, I said, “Okay, maybe I need to write this one thicker.” So it’s a thicker book. And now, here I am to the third edition. I’ve come to the conclusion, this problem is never going to go away. We all have to be educated in this again and again and again and again. I mean, I could be writing this book into the 2050 or whatever and it’s still going to be an issue for most people.
Well, that’s good for book sales, right?
Well, yes, it is. But, you know, if people buy the book, that’s great. I’m really interested in – I’m a customer myself. I’d like to see some really good complaint handling. And I do, I do see it sometimes. And I tell you, it just makes me feel so good that I could have that conversation, get my problem solved and feel better about that company. It’s a good feeling.
Yes, it is definitely a good feeling. And certainly, one way that somebody can tremendously set themselves apart from competitors who are more interested in keeping complaints down and really creating the wrong incentives for a great experience with their customers.
So, thank you, Janelle. This has really been tremendous, and appreciate your time and all that you do to help improve customer service and reduce customer frustration. Because Lord knows, we need it and we’re probably going to need it more.
I mentioned at the top of the program that Janelle has a free gift for our listeners. It’s an article titled Actually, We Should Want to Hear Customer Complaints. So, thanks so much for sharing that, Janelle. We’re going to have a no-strings-attached link to the article on the episode page over at BusinessConfidentialRadio.com. That’s right, you don’t have to put your email in. No app to download, no password. You just click on it and you get to the article, which has some good information.
That’s wonderful.
So, you’ll also be able to learn more about Janelle. Her bestselling book, now in its third edition, A Complaint is a Gift, and a transcript of this interview.
So, thank you so much for listening. Be sure to tell your friends about the show, and leave a positive review. We’ll be back next Thursday with another episode of Business Confidential Now. Until then, have a great day, and an even better tomorrow.
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