I thought that there were two kinds of companies - the enlightened ones that viewed a dissatisfied customer as a major problem - a pull the andon cord and get this fixed right now kind of companies - and those that simply outsourced customer service to India where customers would simply be passed around from one ESL dropout to another until they gave up and went away. Shows just how wrong I can be. Apparently there are still companies with "Complaint Departments". Rather than (1) eliminate the cause of complaints, or (2) ignore complaints, these companies apparently see a third option - manage them.
In fact, there is software available to automate 'managing' complaints. Complaints always struck me a bad thing on many levels, and everything about them qualifies as waste. Spending more money on something that was a complete waste of money to begin with doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea. Rather than create a formal complaint department, it seems to me to be a better idea to empower whoever receives a complaint from a precious customer to stop what they are doing and immediately solve the customer's problem, and to go to the source and eliminate it from happening again.
For that matter, ignoring it makes more sense than 'managing' it. At least you will not be throwing good money after bad.
"Ann Ho, Customer Feedback Manager from Liverpool City Council concludes 'iCasework has been great for Liverpool City Council, it’s a powerful piece of software that has enabled us to improve the way we manage complaints across the organisation.'" How can this be "great for Liverpool City Council? I should think the only thing that would be "great for Liverpool City Council" would be if no one complained.
if only government and health care organizations that might have some requirement to document complaints were 'managing' complaints I suppose it would not be a big deal. But these guys claim, "... we have developed, based upon 12 years of heavy involvement in the complaints management sector, a series of on-demand tailored solutions for industries as varied as local government, retail, financial services, utilities, telecoms, manufacturing and housing ..." There is a whole "complaints management sector"? And it includes manufacturers and retailers? I cannot imagine it includes very many good manufacturers and retailers.
I can't even begin to wrap my mind around the 'justification' the Manager of Complaints would use in a manufacturing company to buy this software ... something like "If we invest $X in software we will reduce the amount of money we are wasting on something that was a waste of money to begin with to an acceptable level of wasting money"?