Dead Parrots Society?
"The isolated complaints department is no more, says Charter UK head of marketing Andrew Aldred. It has ceased to be. Or at least, it should have. Instead, we should be looking at it holistically, as part of broad customer insight."
Sometimes, as in this case, a complaint is straightforward. But often, the complaint is far from this simple (or this funny). What's more, the feedback may not even be a complaint, at least, not in the sense of faulty goods or services. The customer may be making a far more complicated, though no less valid, point.
The feedback may not even be direct: John Cleese may have gone straight back to the point of purchase, but these days, customers don't always do this. They interact with organisations in a variety of ways – at outlet level, or centrally; by phone or by email, or face to face; or very indirectly, via the supply chain, or by venting their opinions using social media.
In short, it's complicated; and what makes it even more so is that major enterprises often compartmentalise. For instance, a marketing department may spend much time using CRM to analyse customer demographics and buying behaviour, and not factor into their assessment the feedback the organisation is getting from the customer service team. Why not? Because those are the people who deal with complaints. They're in a different box. They are, if you like, the dead parrots society, there to resolve issues, and no more, and therefore aren't part of any bigger picture.
They should be. There is an increasing recognition nowadays that market research, demographic analysis, focus groups, feedback, complaints and more are all part of what is being termed customer insight.
Customer insight acknowledges that organisations interact with, or have access to, opinions from their customers that are expressed in these many different ways, and that it less productive, incomplete and indeed potentially misleading to deal with these things separately. A complaint is not just a complaint: it is insight into a customer's perception not just of a product or service, but potentially of the brand as a whole, and aggregating that insight, and feeding it into the bigger picture, can make a big and positive impact on current marketing and on future market development.
To my knowledge, no one company has yet developed a solution to all this, but the need for it is, as I say, recognised – and growing. Some organisations even have customer insight or customer experience directors now, and FMCG, leisure and innovative IT companies are leading the way. Other, more traditional markets have been slower in this regard.
At Charter UK, we're an instrumental part of this attitudinal shift. The Continuum suite enables enterprises to aggregate feedback from a variety of sources, and streamline responses to it. What's more, because the software makes aggregated data very configurable, it can link into other client systems such as business intelligence platforms, enabling organisations to spot trends and act on them – resolving issues before they become fundamental problems, or gaining an insight that can even become an opportunity.
Handling complaints is not the role of a segregated and ignored dead parrots society. It is, or should be, part of customer insight, which is bigger, considerably more far-reaching – and which, unlike John Cleese's Norwegian Blue, will not cease to be anytime soon.
