Customer complaints can give businesses a wake-up call when they're not achieving their fundamental purpose--meeting customer needs. They are a feedback mechanism that can help organizations rapidly and inexpensively shift products, service, style, and market focus. Businesses that don't value their customers' complaints suffer from costly, negative word-of-mouth advertising. Presenting dozens of real-life striking examples of poor--and excellent-- complaint handling, Barlow and Moller show that companies must view complaints as gifts if they are to have loyal customers.

A customer complaint is the most valuable source of feedback you can receive to improve your business. This new and improved second edition guides you through responding to complaints, taking advantage of when complaints become personal, and how you, too, can complain constructively and effectively. The first edition of A Complaint Is a Gift introduced the revolutionary notion that customer complaints are not annoyances to be dodged, denied, or buried but are instead valuable pieces of feedback—in fact, they're your best bargain in market research. Customer complaints can give businesses a wake-up call when they're not achieving their fundamental purpose: meeting customer needs. Complaints provide a feedback mechanism that can help organizations rapidly and inexpensively strengthen products, service style, and market focus. Most importantly, complaints create a moment of truth when a customer who is deciding whether to return can be made even more loyal. Using numerous real-life examples, authors Janelle Barlow and Claus Møller show precisely how to handle complaints in a way that brings benefit to your organization and satisfaction to your customers–even when you have to say no. The second edition features two brand-new chapters on receiving and responding to complaints online; a new section on how to deal with and take advantage of complaints that are directed at your personally; and, turning the tables, a section on how you can complain constructively and effectively. And throughout, the text has been heavily revised, with a wealth of new examples, tools, and strategies.

Full of practical ideas and inspiring stories from people who have already transformed their lives through the Complaint Free program, you'll learn not only how to stop complaining but also how to become more positive and live the life you’ve always dreamed about. More than ten million people in 106 countries have used the simple principles found in this book to eradicate the toxicity of complaining from their lives. And, as a result, they have experienced better health, happier relationships, greater career success and a significant increase in happiness. A Complaint Free World will explain what constitutes a complaint, why we complain, what benefits we think we receive from complaining, how complaining is destructive to our lives, and how we can get others around us to stop complaining. Find out how forming the simple habit of not complaining can transform your health, relationships, career and life. Consciously striving to reformat your mental hard drive is not easy, but you can start now by using the steps Bowen presents here. If you stay with it, you'll find that not only will you stop complaining, but others around you will cease to do so as well and in a short period of time, you'll have a more positive life. “A Complaint Free World is an engaging, enjoyable, easy-to-read reminder that the only permanent, constructive changes you can make in the world are the changes that you make in yourself.” –Gary Zukav, author of The Seat of the Soul and Soul to Soul

Wilber Winkle, an idiosyncratic nebbish with a peculiar focus on the odd and unlikely fact, has corresponded for years with America's major corporations. Fuelling his complaints and comments is a single overriding premise: that the rights of consumers -- his rights -- are under siege, and he must do what he can to defend them. Employing the exasperating curiosity of a six year old and far-fetched notions which only he can devise, Wilber will have readers laughing aloud, trying to read their favourite Wilber letters to friends and relatives without cracking up. A devilishly clever book!

Across the global economy, customers' expectations are continually rising - but many companies fail to deliver against those expectations. With the rise in social media, customers are becoming more vocal in expressing any dissatisfaction, which can both lose existing customers and alienate potential new ones. Complaint Management Excellence provides practical advice, tools and techniques for managers to adopt when managing any complaints that come into their organisation. In order to arrive at a culture where complaints are welcomed, the underlying values, processes, structure, strategy and people within an organization all need to be aligned with, and respect, customer needs. Not only does this improve the long-terms prospects for the company itself, but can have a tremendous knock-on effect in terms of boosting employee morale and engagement. With case studies from companies as diverse as John Lewis, Waitrose, DHL, Hilton Hotels, the Starwood group (including Four Seasons and Ritz Carlton hotels) and BT, Complaint Management Excellence explains what customers are really looking for when they make a complaint, how to avoid conflict and how managers can lead culture change to ensure the best experience for all customers and clients.

In Complaint! Sara Ahmed examines what we can learn about power from those who complain about abuses of power. Drawing on oral and written testimonies from academics and students who have made complaints about harassment, bullying, and unequal working conditions at universities, Ahmed explores the gap between what is supposed to happen when complaints are made and what actually happens. To make complaints within institutions is to learn how they work and for whom they work: complaint as feminist pedagogy. Ahmed explores how complaints are made behind closed doors and how doors are often closed on those who complain. To open these doors---to get complaints through, keep them going, or keep them alive---Ahmed emphasizes, requires forming new kinds of collectives. This book offers a systematic analysis of the methods used to stop complaints and a powerful and poetic meditation on what complaints can be used to do. Following a long lineage of Black feminist and feminist of color critiques of the university, Ahmed delivers a timely consideration of how institutional change becomes possible and why it is necessary.

In this witty and belligerent polemic Robert Hughes inspects and dismantles the core elements of the contemporary American ethos. To the left, he skewers political correctness, Afro-centrism and academic obsession with theory. To the right, he fires broadsides at free-market capitalist demagogy. Hughes is superbly scathing about politically correct shibboleths which are idle gestures rather than real solutions to the problems of racism and sexism; he identifies the confusion between thinking and feeling which bedevils much debate and which leads people to equate intellectual disagreement with personal attack; he uses his own experiences as an art critic and historian to launch a blistering attack on many of the trends in contemporary art. Hughes identifies a hollowness at the cultural core of America and, in this lucid and invigorating diagnosis of a great nation at odds with itself, he has written a masterpiece of robust polemic.