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Not a day has gone past in the past week without someone ringing up from a particular leading high street bank to apologise to me. The bank’s mistakes were, admittedly, woeful. A mandate signed to obtain an extra signature to a business account had been lost. Repeated calls to find out what had happened had stayed unanswered. It then emerged that I had been given the wrong information about the mandate in the first place. It was only when I contacted the press office that action started to be taken.
The episode has been a mini object lesson in how not to treat customers. Most people can excuse an error. Papers do from time to time go missing in the best regulated organisations. What is much harder to tolerate is failure to acknowledge the mistake or to show any enthusiasm for remedying it.
Complaint handling is a skill which companies ignore at their peril. The most fundamental mistake is to seek to cover up an error or just to ignore it and hope it goes away. Far better to under-promise and over-deliver rather than the other way round.
On a hugely more important scale than my minor problem with the bank, consider the contrasting reactions to the two big disasters of 2010. BP sought to minimise the consequences of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and ended up with its reputation badly tarnished. The Chilean Government threw all its resources into rescuing the trapped miners, predicted they would be out at best by Christmas and then brought them up in mid-October to world acclaim.
Good complaint handlers respond quickly, make promises they can keep and are available at the end of a phone. Bad ones are slow, inaccessible and write letters which only leave complainants more angry than they were in the first place. It is best, of course, simply not to do things which give rise to complaints. However, an organisation would have to lead a very charmed existence for its activities never to be questioned. Wise companies have well-tried and robust complaints handling plans.
Some organisations find it very hard to say sorry. Lawyers will sometimes warn them that they are in danger of admitting liability. In fact, it is always possible to express sympathy and regret for inconvenience or harm done to a client without necessarily acknowledging responsibility. If you do that, you have given your organisation a sympathetic and human face which the aggrieved client may not believe you possessed.
To be fair to the bank, their apologies are now fulsome. They have at least opened up the possibility that a rogue individual rather than their whole system was at fault. But the jury is very much still out.
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David Walter, a former correspondent and programme presenter for the BBC and ITN, runs the media strategy company First Take. He offers writing courses, media, presentation and crisis training, PR advice, speechwriting and webcasting.
Tel: 07768 616568 |
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