After reading the Financial Ombudsman Service Annual review I was interested to read the remarkable hike in scale of complaints and the forecast to continue at record levels.The workload of the Financial Ombudsman is now four times larger than it was ten years ago – so as consumers are we more aware of what constitutes good service or are quality and service standards of providers slipping?

Suppliers also need to become more efficient and operating at lower costs.  But efficiency is meaningless unless excellent service is offered as well.  The bits of paper and email correspondence may just be ‘work items and cases’ but represent the real lives of customers.

Often with clients I hear that productivity monitoring and workforce management is key, which yes is paramount especially in the back office and customer contact operations.  However, it is not just time and attendance, productivity and absence management that should be used as performance measures.  How many providers work on getting it ‘right first time’ and practice good operations management?

If providers had the right Management Information they could allocate work according to available skills, manage the quality of work and ‘manage-the-tail’ of their work, ensuring action is taken on the most important work to ensure customer requirements can be met.  Thus reducing customer complaints.  With the right performance measures in place complaints can be reduced or in some cases avoided altogether.

Did you know that a typical business only hears from 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers? The other 96 percent quietly go away.  Of this 96 percent, 68 percent never reveal their dissatisfaction because they perceive an attitude of indifference in the owner, manager or employee.

This statistic is particularly dangerous for businesses because if a dissatisfied customer can’t express their complaints to a business, they’ll express them through other outlets such as friends, neighbours and family.  A typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about their problem.  One in five will tell 20.  It takes 12 positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident. Seven out of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favour.  If you resolve it on the spot, 95 percent will do business with you again. (Source: Art Waller, Regional Department Head for Utah State University).

So, as my colleague Andrew Baker mentioned in his ‘Quality’ blog whatever your measure for quality, how do you know the amount you verify, check, inspect or audit is enough?  And what can you do to build quality in before the event, rather than find out after?

If you would like to know more how good operations management can reduce your complaints and deliver bottom line results then take our free site survey.  Call eg today on 01785 715772