When will we learn to love complaints?

I have just made a complaint to an electricity company. We recently moved house, changed our supplier, and needed to pay off a small final sum to the company. Because of a glitch in their online payment system, it proved impossible to do this. After receiving a threat to send bailiffs round, I finally managed to speak to someone in the debts department, and paid the bill. I also suggested they should change their system to save customers and the company unnecessary trouble and expense. The woman I spoke to was courteous, patient, and clearly well trained to deal with complaints. She explained why their system was not geared for new householders. However, she was completely uninterested in my suggestion about changing it. Rather than pressing my point, I wished her a good day and ended the call. The conversation led me to think about complaints, and how people generally deal with them. Complaints about the health service have been in the news in the United Kingdom. Last year, the Francis Report into poor care at the Mid Staffordshire Trust identified a systemic failure to hear to the complaints of patients and their families, or to respond to ones from their own staff. Similarly, a recent parliamentary committee has described a ‘culture of denial’ across the NHS as a whole, and a ‘toxic cocktail’ relating to complaints, with the public reluctant to express their concerns, and defensiveness on the part of services in addressing them. It is easy to imagine that this defensiveness may sometimes take the form of rudeness or even anger on the part of health service personnel. No doubt this does occur, but I suspect that in most cases it takes a subtler form, more like the behaviour of the woman at the electricity company. In general, our attitude when dealing with the public can probably be summed up as follows: ▸ I need to listen to complaints and pacify the people who make them ▸ It is my duty to explain why my organisation does things in a particular way ▸ If people suffer because of the system, they are exceptions and the system itself probably does not need to be changed ▸ If the system does need to be changed, I do not know who is responsible for this, or how to find out ▸ If I do know who is responsible, I doubt if they will be interested in the problem, or want to do anything about it ▸ If people persist in complaining after I have given them an explanation, they do not really understand my role and they are being difficult.