As my Now page will tell you, my day job is handling complaints for a major UK-based telecommunications company. My role sits in our executive complaints team, where we deal with the most serious of complaints—those sent to our senior bosses, to MPs, to the papers, and so on.
One of the most fascinating parts of my job is the edge cases.
Think about it: our frontline customer service operation is optimised for the 99% of queries that come in at scale:
- “How do I set up a Direct Debit?”
- “My broadband stopped working last night.”
- “Can I add Netflix to my package?”
What comes to my team is the remaining 1%—the edge cases.
When you speak to a dozen ordinary people every day, you have the privilege of seeing beneath the tip of the iceberg. What might be simply the third complaint about our home phone service that day for me might be quite literally the difference between life and death for a vulnerable customer with a telecare alarm connected.
It’s the same with other types of complaint too. A complaint about bills being too high might sit atop recent redundancy. A complaint about a missed engineer’s appointment might be because the customer struggles with their mobility and couldn’t get to the door in time. A complaint about the wrong name on a letter might come just days or weeks after a bereavement.
As anyone who has ever worked in customer service will tell you, it’s seldom the case that anyone contacts you on the best day of their life. Indeed, my best days have been spent with my nearest and dearest, a varied playlist on Apple Music, and a creamy pint of Guinness, rather than sat alone calling my broadband provider.
By the time that you’re wound up enough to escalate all the way to my team, your complaint is often less about how it started and more about the journey that you’ve had along the way. At that point, it’s often gone from a simple enquiry to feeling like you’re being heard but not listened to. My first job is to remind you that there’s a human just like you behind the brand.
It makes me think that we need to look at complaints differently: not just as a measure of when we get things wrong, but as a mirror of the complex and interconnected lives that we all now lead. I struggle to think of many complaints that I’ve dealt with lately that have been as simple as a service failure alone.
As I sign off, I shall leave you with one of my favourite quotes by the late MP Jo Cox, as I think it sums up far more elegantly than I ever could what my job reminds me of every day:
“We all have far more in common than that which divides us.”
Jo Cox MP
The more customers that I speak to, the more I think about just how right she was.