How to Handle Customer Complaints to Enhance Loyalty

A woman sitting on tatami mats is about to bow.
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Customer complaints are going to sell

Why is there no lamp in the freezer compartment of a fridge? Suitcase wheels should be replaceable! I believe you have this kind of small complaints a lot in your daily life. Most of them are too small to express, but they will corrode you inside little by little. In Japan, there’s a good service to recommend you. It’s a “complaint buying service center.” You can put complaints in writing and send them to the center. The AI rates the complaints in 50 points, and you can get Amazon gift cards according to the points. This is totally due to the technological advancement of AI, from character recognition to sentence recognition. If it were not for AI, the service couldn’t match financially.

Positive small complaints move society forward

If complaints are big enough, people would talk directly to commodity or service suppliers. On the other hand, small ones don’t come to the surface because most people are likely to think “they are not the sort of things to speak up.” I’m sure that’s a big social loss because such small complaints are exactly what suppliers want to know to improve their business.

The center works good for consumers as well. It’s not about the financial merit, namely Amazon gift cards, but about positive emotional effects. In most cases, the root of complaints stems from human emotion. Consumers don’t mean to be impatient with commodity defects or low-level service, but they want other people to listen to their feelings. Just give it a thought. You, as a consumer, will never want anything to do with suppliers if you are really impatient.

Planting trees to the number of complaints

In Japan, the wooden furniture industry is sometimes called the complaint industry. That’s because consistent quality is almost impossible to achieve due to the property of natural raw material. Most customers understand our explanation about the nature of wood, but some don’t. Our deep problem is that we’re not sure if replacement works because it’s also made of the one and only piece of wood. That’s why I’m interested in this service. Just a thought: we will plant trees every time after listening to complaints, for example. This would be healthy for human emotion (our emotion as well) and the environment. How do you like it?


Shungo Ijima

He is travelling around the world. His passion is to explain Japan to the world, from the unique viewpoint accumulated through his career: overseas posting, MBA holder, former official of the Ministry of Finance.


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