Do you complain? Or are you a “good” customer?

Are you a customer who believes in good service delivery? Or do you feel too guilty to complain about bad service? Up until recently – I was the type of customer, who accepted any type of service. The good customer. The customer who believed that everyone in service delivery deserved the benefit of the doubt. And to some extent I still do. Working in the service industry most of my life, I almost felt like I owed waitresses, and cashiers for the all the crappy customers I had encountered in my life.

When I was pregnant with Daniel, this changed. Maybe it was the fact that I was full of emotions. Perhaps my fuse was too short. Whatever the reason might have been. I began to feel like as a consumer maybe I deserved more. Somehow, I think I had four of five run ins with companies who just gave me really bad service. And for the first time in my life, I went back and said “No” – this is not acceptable.

I complained.

I’m not going to bore you with the details or attempt to justify why because this would mean that I somehow feel guilty about complaining – which I do. But I shouldn’t. After chats with numerous people I just feel like sometimes we as customers (and that includes everyone), just don’t realise how much power we have. That we are the reason retailers are making money today. We get to choose where we spend our money and that is why we actually do deserve good service.

What? Yes! We deserve people treating us well, calling to follow-up on the order you placed last week. Companies should explain why things are taking longer than anticipated. AND guess what else? They should call you BEFORE you call them to follow up. It’s the way the companies say thank you for choosing us – it really is the only way they can say thank you. Outside of corporate social responsibility, and competitions where products are sponsored.

It’s the way that they ensure you are coming back to get some more of this good or great service. 

All this information probably seems pretty logical right? Yet, there are still people like me who before my recent epiphany accepted any of kind of service. After I complained the first time, I felt really guilty. I had Customer Services call me back and I think I got someone into trouble. This was not my intention – but it happened. (Feeling a little worst) After a few hours, did you read that right? Yeah hours, not days, a manager got back to me about how they could rectify this and try to offer me something better.

Recently, I had another run in with another customer services and I felt so bad when someone contacted me. I had to get Ian to give me a pep talk about why I should have complained, and shouldn’t apologise when they try to compensate for the bad service. Don’t get me wrong – I am the first person to give someone a chance, I understand that things happen. Most especially in service delivery – when most of the time, your service is dependent on someone else doing their job too. I do think though that a call to say something went wrong goes a long way.

It made me wonder how many others complain – am I the only one that feels this way?

In the meantime – let’s talk about this – how do you feel about complaining? Do you complain or feel too guilty?