A Business’s Best Friend

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Complaining customers are a business’s best friend. Happy customers are a business’s worst enemy. Why? Because they do not complain.

Like it or not complaining customers are a business’s best friend. Regrettably, most businesses fail to recognise this. To their peril. Because businesses that ignore criticism and complaints never get to hear about where or how they fail the customer.

However, dissatisfied customers keeps the business on its toes and forces the business to be at the ‘top of its game’ and to keep on fixing problems and striving to perfect their service or product(s).

Happy satisfied customers do not complain. They are a danger to a business because they can lull business owners into thinking all is well. Oh dear. Wrong. Especially when complaining endusers are ignored for being ‘pests’. I know what the staff in businesses say. I was one of them. Complaints do get buried. Absurd thing to do and in hindsight so stupid not to realise the potential benefit a complaint presented to the business.

To turn a miserable complaining customer into a happier one by acknowledging them and their complaint is half the rectification battle won. Then by doing something positive about the issue and communicating your actions to them and letting them see the fix turns the complainer into an ally who will keep an eye out in future for faults. Surely this is the right thing for business to do?

And with this in mind, it isn’t often that I feel disparaged about a South African product. Well, yes I do because in the 70’s there was that local designed and manufactured bakkie that rolled off the assembly line at GM’s factory in Port Elizabeth and sold so ridiculously few it became a non-event. Ergo end of local car designs for a while. Or for ever.

However, I do so want South Africans to succeed in internet technology and claim their rightful place on the world stage as innovators of quality, socially beneficial products which can be used by millions across the internet. One already has, (Thawte) and Afrigator and Amatomu are two recent launches that rose up to grab the grail and fill the void after Mark Shuttleworth blasted off into space. Figuratively and literally.

The two aggregators launched amid a media orgy and fanfare about South African innovation and I was swept up in the tail and rode the congratulatory wave with you. Hoorah, the domestic wishlist for local development had been heard, actioned and implimented by a small band of local talent and most importantly, young virile South African innovators. We now had our own homebred aggregators! Magic. We all celebrated the success loudly.

We now had more South African heroes in online social technology. It was a great moment and this is what pisses me off. It was a moment. Like a comet blazing its way across our sky at night, blindingly bright and effervescent at first, one of the two has fizzled all too quickly. Why? It was so sudden. Why? That comet tail should still be passing brightly by up in the stratosphere from horizon to horizon.

And so now as a customer (a user) I am worried. One has carried on to soldify its position. The other appears to not have listened to the complaining endusers. I agree, perfection is a non-attainable. That is a given. But striving toward it should be desirous of all business owners. Only by continually correcting and taking onboard feedback (especially negative comments), from customers can a business improve, go forward and reap the resultant success.

Not to acknowledge and act on complainers comments is commercial suicide.

A Business’s Best Friend

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