5 ways to make complaining easier

Most people don’t like to complain, but as a recent experience has reminded me, any organization that hopes to keep its customers happy should make complaining easy.

Each week, for the past eight years I’ve filled my car up with gas at the Petro-Canada station in my neighbourhood. Their price is never the lowest, but the convenience of having only to make one left turn out of my driveway keeps me coming back.

And I quite enjoy the ability to use my debit and Petro-Points cards directly at the pump when I pay for my gas. In every way, Petro-Canada has been meeting my expectations. That is, until a couple of weeks ago when they made some changes to their pumps.

My Petro-Points card (despite the long crack through the middle) was accepted easily, but I received an “unable to read card” message when I tried my debit card – a card that gives me no problems anywhere else. Several attempts later, all with the same result, I cancelled my transaction and went inside to pay for my gas.

“There’s something wrong with your new pump and it wouldn’t read my debit card,” I told the woman inside.

“We’ve had a few customers tell us the same thing,” she politely told me, as she processed my debit card with no issue whatsoever.

Perhaps I was foolish to think that my feedback went any further than that counter, but I was disappointed this week to find that the pump was still unable to read my debit card. I paid inside and it bothered me that the same woman I had complained to the week before didn’t notice that I had tried unsuccessfully to pay outside. I didn’t want cigarettes, lottery tickets, newspapers or coffee – why would I come inside to pay?

I don’t blame her for the problem (surely she was neither the decision maker behind the new pumps nor the installer), but I do expect that she would offer to do something about it, especially when others had complained before me!

While I’m very interested in seeing that my debit card once again works at these pumps, the absence of an easy way to report my problem to someone who can fix it has me very frustrated. I could probably visit the Petro-Canada website and lodge a formal complaint and perhaps, someone there would respond to me, but is it reasonable to expect that I would put in this much effort? If ever I did, how would I feel about that? Wouldn’t it just be easier to take my business to the next closest gas provider?

The reality is that the easier you make it for your customers to complain, the more likely you are to hear where you need to improve and keep them as customers.

Here are my suggestions to make complaining easier:

1. Train your employees to ask, look for and resolve customer problems
2. Provide a phone number for complaints
3. Provide an email
4. Provide social media channels for customer feedback
5. Train your employees to ask, look for and resolve customer problems

What’s that? I have this point twice?

Good.