It’s been said that for every customer who complains, there
are a hundred others who are upset about the very same thing and remain silent. That’s likely a made-up statistic, as there
it does not seem possible to measure it accurately – but it’s entirely
plausible, and likely to be low. This
is, or ought to be, a serious concern for customer service because the silent
customer generally resolves their problem by taking their business elsewhere,
if not immediately then at their earliest convenience.
To make matters worse, customer complaints are most often
treated as nuisances. In my own
experience, complaining to a company about some deficiency in their service is
seldom met with eagerness to resolve the situation to my satisfaction. And even when that happens, the firm makes
only a token effort. Mostly, I get the
distinct sense that they simply want me to shut up and go away so that they can
carry on business as usual, even though “business as usual” has failed at
achieving customer satisfaction. So for
the most part, I’ve stopped complaining in and simply take my business
elsewhere. I doubt that I am alone in
this.
From the customer perspective, complaining adds to the cost
of obtaining satisfaction – as “cost” includes effort in addition to the
money-price of a good. If it takes two
hours to resolve a service issue and achieve the goal for which I’d purchased
the product, that’s two hours of my time that’s not spent doing something more
pleasant or productive with my time.
I’d be better off paying more money (whatever sum two hours is worth) to
a firm that does a better job of solving the problem for which I’ve paid.
And “two hours” is likely a good estimate. It generally takes two to three phone calls,
each of which involves about ten minutes of dealing with a computerized menu
and then being put on hold to speak to someone who can help. In some instances it may involve taking an
item back to a store, or packing it up and taking it to a shipping company,
both of which consume a considerable amount of time.
In this sense, complaining can be seen as an economic
choice: the time it takes to complain is weighed against the benefit that might
be achieved by complaining – even if you ignore the sunk cost of purchasing a
good or service that failed to solve the problem, this often exceeds the cost
of starting over with another firm.
Take for the example of a customer who earns $40,000 per year
and has problems with a $20 appliance and it arrives broken. He may well spend 10 minutes combing the
website for the customer service number, 30 minutes on the phone to get a
return authorization, 30 minutes to repackage the item for shipping, 20 minutes
driving (each way) to a post office, and 20 minutes waiting in line when he
gets there. In the end, he has spent
$40 worth of his time* - not including travel costs. So he takes a loss of $20 for complain as
opposed to throwing it away and ordering a new one from a different supplier
online.
Admittedly, it’s doubtful that customers do the calculations
and many do not consider the value of their time – they simply think that
complaining to the supplier is not worth the hassle. Essentially, it’s the very same thing, as
the emotional assessment of “hassle” is a consideration of the amount of time that
must be spent doing unpleasant things in order to effect a solution. And multiply that by the estimated chance
that complaining will actually result in a satisfactory income, and the value
of complaining seems even less.
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* Using income to monetize leisure time is problematic, but
I’m using that here to avoid a long diversion to consider the value of leisure
time.
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