5

A Complaining Customer Is Your Best Friend

One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship with a customer is the absence of complaints. Nobody is ever that satisfied, especially not over an extended period of time. The customer is either not being candid or not being contacted.

—Theodore Levitt

Business School Professor, Harvard University

As a manager, it can be easy to subscribe to “no news is good news” thinking when it comes to your staff’s service performance. You work diligently to ensure your people have the right training, coaching, and technology to give customers their best every day, and you see firsthand much of the good work they do to solve vexing problems and address tough questions. When customer evaluation reports ...

Get Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.