Only 4% of dissatisfied customers ever tell you they are unhappy. The other 96% vote with their feet, and 91% never come back. Even worse, dissatisfied customers typically tell eight to ten of their friends your service is bad.

There are two reasons why customers don’t complain. First, it is hard to complain. To do so, we have to reveal a piece of our emotional selves. Second, employees rarely encourage complaints. Many have trouble hearing a complaint as a feedback. Instead, they hear it as a personal attack.

Employees usually ask a rhetorical question: "How is your dinner?" "Is everything OK here?" Often the delivery of the question is such that meaningful answer would be practically impossible. In defense of employees, few organizations relish complaints. Most employers can get away with bringing one complaint to their supervisor every few weeks. But no more than that.

For those of us providing a service, our relationship with customers is everything is the sale. When the relationship goes away. In effect, building the relationship is the sale. When the relationship goes away, so does the customer.

Without eliciting feedback, there is no relationship. If reducing complaints is a shortcut to oblivion, increasing them is the road to stardom.

Complaints are not good or bad, right or wrong. They are opportunities to serve customers in different ways.

The fastest way to develop a customer-focused culture is by generating complaints. We can begin by communicating to employees the need to form relations with customers, to view them as partners. A partnership needs feedback:

Your employees will encourage feedback if:

• You help them view complaints as opportunities.
• You challenge them to see how many complaints they can generate in one week.
• Instead of asking, "Is everything OK here?" they say, "What one thing could we do that would improve our service to you?"