Making the Most of Customer Complaints, - MIT Sloan Management Review

Making the Most of Customer Complaints, - MIT Sloan Management Review

Service Failures (more commonly known as Customer Complaints) are also failures like equipment failures that need the careful attention of managers.

This article provides interesting insights into dealing with service failures. It means a lot more than just fixing the immediate problem, which we usually do to address any type of failure.


The solution proposed in this article is to address tensions that arise among front-line employees who handle complaints, the managers of those employees, and the customers themselves. Steps include starting a complaints database that would induce managers to think out of the box to improve service, and rewarding service employees not for reductions in complaints but for providing exceptional solutions to problems.

But what is intuitively not clear is that all product complaints are always linked to the design of our factories, the design of our machines and its upkeep and the design of the associated processes. I have seen only a few companies that make a direct link of complaints to plant engineering (I am not somehow comfortable with the terms like mechanical maintenance, electrical maintenance etc since it puts people into narrow silos and kills the joy of enjoying the engineering job in its totality). Hindustan Unilever, as I have seen in one of their factories, directly addresses product complaints through shop-floor improvements and redesign of their machines, components, materials, packaging and processes. They take up this activity very seriously and often succeed in solving problems permanently through innovative methods thus bringing about a change in the number of product complaints. Tata Metaliks is another company I have seen in my fairly long career that also tries to address customer product complaints through innovative improvements in the process and equipment. However, improvement in a process industry is far more difficult than making improvements in a FMCG industry. This is because process industries are far more capital intensive and once a machine is selected and installed it is very difficult to undo the mistakes done or modify the system.

But unfortunately, actively linking product complaints to shop floor improvement is not the case with most companies I know of. Why is this? This is because, companies that succeed are companies that are managed by people and managers who prefer thinking out of the box and concentrate on the quality rather than on numbers. However, the most important reason, as I see it is that these organizations are determined to succeed. And such people or cultures are difficult to get or build. The intention and the will of successful organizations are clear. And such organizations are plain lucky to have such managers and employees on their roll. They build the much needed courage amongst others in the organizations to play, experiment and fully enjoy their jobs. Because innovation is simply 'serious play'.

The worst case, I have seen over the last thirty years is that of Hindustan Motors. They just refused to improve their machines, design, materials and processes. They could have done fantastic innovations through simple engineering improvements. But they stubbornly refused to listen. The result is that they have now almost managed to push their product (their good old Ambassador cars) and themselves to oblivion. Such companies behave like 'ostriches' that refuse to see and acknowledge the problem as it is and do strange things believing something else would bring about their profitability. Hence they simply lack the system to improve. They either believe that 'quick fixes' and 'clever manipulations' are enough to do the job or simply don't believe that 'customer pays for their product'.

So, are you linking customer complaints to engineering improvements in the shop-floor or the factory?

To read the main article just click on the link.

Signing off
dibyendu