You carry out a customer satisfaction survey and you have a decline in the number of customer complaints you are receiving. A good thing surely? Well, maybe not…. What if the reason for the “good” news is that your customers have become indifferent towards you? Or that your systems for receiving customer complaints are so unwieldy that customers hate the time and effort needed to register a complaint? There are just two examples – of course there could be other explanations too that reflect badly on your company.
Now of course it is good to monitor the number of complaints. And tracking the trends over time are also a useful indicator. But you need to interpret the results correctly!