Page 87 - Communication in Organizations Basic Skills and Conversation Models

Communication in organizations 76

Listening to the complaint

If guests come to you with a complaint, they want only one thing: that you really listen to
them, that you take the time for them and allow them to make their complaints. It is up to
you to create an ideal situation and stimulate the guests to tell you their story. This calls
for active listening. This phase determines whether your company will lose these guests
forever or whether they will return on a regular basis.
Some of the listening skills you need to use in this phase are opening the conversation,
attentive behaviour and the selective skills of paraphrasing and concreteness:

After seating Paul Paper and offering him a cup of coffee, Harry Haddock
comes straight to the point and opens the conversation by referring to their
telephone call:

HARRY HADDOCK: On the phone you sounded somewhat irritated when I asked you
about the New Year’s party and you told me that was the reason you wanted to have
this meeting.
PAUL PAPER: Yes, you’ve got that right. I really expected you guys to offer us
something better than this. You’ve organized our New Year parties before and we
never had any complaints. Maybe someone else was in charge this time because it
really was a mess.
HARRY: I’m very sorry to hear this. Can you tell me what went wrong? [concreteness]
PAUL: Well, to begin with, there weren’t enough plates. As you know we agreed that
guests could take a new plate when they went to the buffet for a second time. But
everybody had to use the same plate again. I asked your assistant to fix it, which he
did immediately, but it was too late. You cannot expect people to use a plate to put a
salad on after using it for a fish dish. And there wasn’t enough white wine. Red was
okay, so was beer and soda, but most people ate fish and they wanted to drink white
wine with it.

Showing understanding

By reflection of feelings, for example, by saying ‘Yes, I can see that must have really
upset you’ or ‘You must be really disappointed’, you indicate that you understand and
respect the seriousness of the complaint. You then summarize the client’s story to make
sure you have understood it correctly.
Try to avoid justifying yourself or your company by explaining possible causes or
making up reasons. Guests who have a complaint are not interested in possible causes;
they want you to do something about the complaint.

HARRY: This situation must have been annoying for both the party guests and you.
[reflection of feelings] Not only did we not supply enough plates so that guests could
use clean ones whenever they wanted to eat something, but there wasn’t enough white