Complaining Can Help!

Companies care about how they are perceived. That's why they spend millions of dollars trying to create images that will cause people to think better of them, deserved or otherwise. When one lets you down, personally, let them know it. A righteous but courteously expressed complaint can go a long way. A freebie may await you!

As moneyed and as powerful as big companies appear to be, most of them have a soft spot of vulnerability. It is a spot on their corporate body they don't speak about but it is where even an individual consumer with a legitimate complaint can get things offered to make things OK again. That soft spot is their underbelly of hypersensitive public perception. No publicly visible company wants to be seen in a bad light by either stockholders or consumers.

Think about the recent flurry of ads from well-known companies that are parts of international petroleum interests reminding us that they are really good people looking out for us and for the environment. Right.

Big companies can be frighteningly insensitive to the situations and needs of individual people, whether they are their own employees or their customers. Thankfully, large businesses remain very concerned with their public image; With the way they are perceived by the people who decide where and on what to spend money for products and services. Of course, corporations are not, as a rule naïve. They understand that how they are perceived requires no direct reality-based connection with whom and how they actually are.They deal, primarily in the three "P"s of capitalistic success: Products, Perceptions and Profits.

These "Three P's" interact and directly impact each other. Products effect perceptions and both have a measureable impact on the bottom line - the profits.

Everything business leaders consider and decide to act on is based on a system of reasoning based on what is referred to, commonly, as a Cost Benefit Analysis. Essentially this matrix is a composite of interdependent formulas, subjectively recalled experience and situationally specific considerations and decisions that have been rendered in the past. The ideas is that these factors will, if correctly understood, will inform those with the current responsibility of decision making to choose course of action that will benefit their goals.

All management, the protesting and resoundingly righteous sounds of gobbledigook notwithstanding to the contrary, the most compelling considerations will always be, "How can we generate the greatest profits?" and "How will this make us look?" The goal of advertising, generally, to use the second issue to better achieve the first.

When a company is caught in such an inconsistent position by an employee, that person is called a 'whistleblower.' That person is often blamed for the problem they have revealed, accused of have causing it, and then sued to reimburse the company for the damages caused by having had their "Good Name" sullied.

Sometimes, these inconsistencies and indicators of dishonesty, poor governance, shoddy design and lack of caring about the consequences to consumers of using an inferior product can be brought into focus not by a staff person, but by a user of the product/service. In some instances, people who have been markedly impacted by the sloppy design, careless manufacture or preposterously expensive and inconvenient distribution of the item, the door to a gold mine may have been found buried in the perennial sands of corporate denial.

When customers who can document what happened, when and with who, most companies are embarrassed sufficiently as to want to do something to 'make it right' so as to reduce the risks of that bad publicity arising from a mild to moderate complaint that has internet 'legs' and goes vital. Corporate executives do not suffer public humiliation well.

The bottom line is simply this: Complaining does not guarantee that a company you feel wronged by will do anything to try to make it right. However, if you simply accept a poor service or disappointing product, you will never see anything from the company at all - that is for certain.

Complaining is not to be confused with throwing a tantrum. Reasonable, assertive, firm but respectful negative comments ("feedback" if you like) can be heard and oftentimes responded to appropriately by people at the second or third level of customer support who have just enough authority to do something nice to quell the ruffled feathers of a dissatisfied customer.