Let's talk about complaints. So most people just don't like complaints. In fact, most people, when you talk about complaints in businesses, one of the things that you do I mean, I guess it's in its natural, they go into a defensive mode. It's a bit like some of those complaints. And we put the Dukes up. But actually I want what I want to do is I want you to think about actually what complaints really are, and why they can actually be good and positive.

Sometimes, because if you think about it, we think about the what we talked about before we think about a silent complaints that we get, then actually, in reality, when it's better, possibly having a complaint than a silent complaint, because at least it's there and we can deal with it. So in actual fact, we should start trying to look at complaints or when things go wrong, and people complain to us as an opportunity. It's an opportunity to put things right and to make amends for mistake of when things have gone wrong. And I think there's a really, there's a really, really simple way that we can think about how you know, how we, how we deal with those. And because actually, if you think about how we respond to them is like, yes, we all go defensive when somebody's criticizing us, that's natural. But actually, in many times, in many cases, when people complain, all they want to do is they just want to tell you how they feel.

So really, it's an emotional thing, right? So I learned a really simple way of a really, very, very good way and a very effective way of how to deal with complaints. And the first thing that we would, you should do when people want to complain to you is, first you have to listen. You have to listen because you have to listen to properly understand. It's not about reacting. It's about listening, and about understanding.

And then the second thing we need to do once somebody fully explained what has gone on what's happened, then we need to actually try and actually understand and empathize with them and how they feel about it. But then take responsibility for it. Because it's our problem, it's not theirs. Once you've done that, once you taking responsibility, let me take that off your hands, then you need to ask about a potential solution and proposes a potential solution, because then he's taking responsibility and you're turning into action. And then the final stage is that you have to then deliver on that, deliver on that promise, deliver on that, that thing that you've taken responsibility for, to solve that problem. And the way to remember that is, is an acronym and the acronym is lead.

L for Listen, empathize, a for ask D for deliver. So, we talked about complaints, we talked about handling complaints, and we talked about how we should get better at that because it's an opportunity right now. I know that they'll still be a lot of people out there that are watching these videos. Just going yeah, still not feeling the love for that. I'm still struggling with the whole handling complaints thing. But let me give you two bits of evidence that hopefully will encourage you to get great at handling complaints.

And the first one is basically a psychological phenomenon called a service recovery paradox. And what that shows is that when things go wrong, and then a company or you do a great job of fixing that problem, that the customers perception of the firm, and the level of satisfaction is higher than it would have been before. So when you recover Well, you end up boosting satisfaction. And this doesn't mean however, that you should go and create opportunities where you get your customers to complain, that's just not a good strategy. And just saying you should recover well not create those complaint opportunities. That's just the There's also other research shows that other research that showed that we learn, we earn rather loyalty at two points.

And the first one is that the point of transactions when we first buy from a company, and the second point is when something goes wrong. And then a company has to fix something that we have a service issue or whatever. And there is generally split sort of 40% on point of purchase and 40% on when something goes wrong. So there's evidence that says that handling complaints is a way to generate increased customer loyalty. And so hopefully, I've made a pretty good case of why we should get really great or really are more comfortable, rather, handling complaints.