A Complaint Is a Gift, 3rd Edition: How to Learn from Critical Feedback and Recover Customer Loyalty

By Janelle Barlow

The third edition of this bestseller (over 275,000 copies sold) builds on the tested formula that helps organizations recognize the value of complaints using updated examples and concepts in the age of COVID-19.

The first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift introduced the revolutionary notion that customer complaints are not annoyances to be dodged, denied, or buried but are instead valuable pieces of feedback-not to mention your best bargain in market research. Complaints provide a feedback mechanism that can help organizations rapidly and inexpensively strengthen products, service style, and market focus. Most importantly, complaints that are well received create customer loyalty.

This new edition condenses the tried and true eight-step formula into a tighter, more efficient three-step formula. From her work with clients, the author has updated industry-specific complaint examples and added in new concepts, such as a process that enables employees to handle complaints with increased emotional resilience-something that is sorely needed since dealing with increasingly difficult customers is a common occurrence in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Handling complaints doesn't have to be a negative, soul-crushing experience. Janelle Barlow gives the right tools to treat each of them as a source of innovative ideas that can transform your business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781523002955

Book preview

Reviews for A Complaint Is a Gift, 3rd Edition

[detailmuse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A Complaint is a Gift is a gift -- the gift being increased success by companies that acknowledge and adopt its principles of customer service. And increased effectiveness by individuals who apply them even to their personal lives.The book's 14 chapters explore the psychology of complaining (and not complaining); the benefits when companies choose to hear and resolve complaints (vs think that customers are nasty annoyances, or naively assume that no news is good news); and strategies to develop a business culture that solicits and resolves complaints.Published in 1996, there are only two aspects not still current: 1) the chapter on how to encourage customers to report complaints lacks mention of Internet web sites -- a revision could explore these convenient conduits; and 2) although the customer-service examples remain valid, the businesses mentioned tend to be dated -- not today's "hot" companies. And in the end, I still see the front-line customer service rep as having a most difficult job; I would like to see more strategies that support these folks.