How many of you enjoy getting complaints? I don’t think anyone would respond positively to that question except me. As much as you hate getting complaints your customer hates having to complain. Like you, everyone wants everything right the first time. They don’t want to have to go through the experience of having something go wrong with their carpet or floor covering. Whether its a problem like excessive fuzzing or pilling that takes time to occur or something as immediate as an obvious physical blemish in the carpet or an installation related issue that irks them. In fact, the fuzzing and pilling is more the type of problem that you’d rather have than the obvious blemish or installation problem. Why? Because the obvious things will upset the customer more because if they were able to see the problem right away you and the manufacturer should have been able to also. Shame on both of you for not better inspecting the goods and letting them get out your door. The manufacturer and the dealer should live by this rule; if the customer can see the blemish in the flooring material then we should have seen it too and we have no excuse than to immediately resolve the complaint, whatever it takes.

As for the installation, the dealer hires or sub-contracts to what are supposed to be professional tradesmen who are entrusted with installing the products without any problems. That means poorly made seams, power stretching, seam sealing, no damage to the product and even vacuuming and cleaning up when finished. The dealer is in control of this service whether it is performed by hired crews or sub-contracted.

These are only the beginnings of the problems, the fact that they exist. Even more controllable is the response to complaints. Even though you hate to get them and the customer hates complaining to you, it’s an inevitable part of your business. How minimize and handle them makes all the difference in the world separating the true professional businessman from those that aren’t. Your response should be fast, understanding and helpful. What often happens, because complaints are painful, is you move away from them, you don’t respond and hope they’ll go away, even if it’s subconsciously. Thus birthing the term “The Slow No” explained to me by a developer I recently looked at a problem for. It means the party receiving the complaint doesn’t respond, they drag their feet, put off communications, bury their head in the sand or otherwise try to push the problem off. The Slow No is agonizing for the customer, they hold out hope but in their heart they know they’re being forgotten. This takes place over a period of time, that’s why it’s called The Slow No. They think the dealer is telling them no. No to calling them, responding to them, taking them serious or doing anything about fixing or replacing their floor covering.

As a result the customer loses patience, becomes frustrated, angry, disillusioned, confrontational and vindictive. They turn up the heat on the dealer and call in reinforcements, their attorney. Once this happens you are lucky indeed to find an easy resolution to the problem. But you know what, you brought this all on yourself. If you had responded quickly and decisively you wouldn’t be involved in this costly predicament now. And costly it will be. Whatever you might have thought would have taken care of the problem quickly and cheaply is now only a wish. You’ll be lucky not to contribute blood in some of these cases. You created the problem and you have to suffer the consequences. Anytime your customer has to resort to hiring an attorney, it’s your fault because you failed to respond to them in a timely and responsible manner. You made them suffer The Slow No, now they’re going to subject you to it.

Always respond to complaints quickly; the faster the better. See how much easier and comfortable it is to resolve complaints fast. You’ll save face, the customer and money.

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