Customer Reviews

Complaint Management: The Heart of CRM

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In the past few decades the Services Industry has advanced long way - in a direction from product services to a customer centric business environments.
Although the quantitative and qualitative importance of services - as well as its spectrum of offerings - has grown quite considerably, the thrust of activity still seems solely to center around its operational tasks and processes. Bernd Stauss' and Wolfgang Seidel's revolutionary Complaint Managent model represents an impressive progress in our understanding of what services organisations must do to become outstanding and exemplary leaders in the roles of services providers and services innovators.
I have read the book entirely page by page, each chapter creating more desire and curiosty to read the next one.
Today the aspects of complaint management are used probably in hundreds of business facilities around the world, yet there is to my knowledge no other book or public documentation providing such a holistic introduction and a guidance to everyone in services management, to enable the creation of a powerful blue print for services organisations.

Walter Duschek, Speaker of the Supervisory Board Spirit/21 AG, VP AFSMI

It is an unusual book because of the total approach to complaint management. The weaknesses of most CRM books is lacking in this book. The reason is that after having read the book you have a complete picure of what complaining behavior and complaint managment is. You also know how complaints are related to CRM. Moreover, and what is most rare is that you get practical advice about how to manage complaint management in your firm or how to learn how to teach complaint management. In other words, you know both the value of managing complaint management as well as the cost of not doing so. If you are itnerested in introducing complaint management or have already introduced - buy this book!
Inger Roos, Associate professor at Karlstad university, Service Research Center (CTF)

When companies implement Customer Relationship Management (CRM), they often find that their number of complaints shoots up. Berndt Stauss and Wolfgang Seidel candidly explain that often, companies actively discourage complaints with processes that are so barrier-ridden that consumers switch to another company's products rather than negotiate the maze. As an alternative, Stauss and Seidel present a CRM-based complaint management system that, for enlightened corporate citizens, can become a strategic asset and even an indirect revenue source. Occasionally, they get a little carried away with their "consultantese" and terms like "process owner" and "complaint owner." Nevertheless, the seven-page complaint-management checklist at the end of the book is particularly valuable. We strongly recommend this book to CRM managers who want to know what their customers really think.

This book is not another marketing book praising how good you should treat your customers, even though it has one of the 'hot' words in its title (is CRM still hot?). Instead, it is a very thorough and rich analysis of all the elements that a service manager needs to consider if the issue of complaints falls near his/her area of responsibilities.

The authors take you through a precise and well structured account of all elements of the complaint management process. First they describe why and how customers are likely to complain; then they go into how to stimulate, receive, process, control, and analyze complaints, and then back to the likely customer reaction to our response. The last third of the book tackles the organizational and operational issues that you will need to sort out to implement these recommendations: human, organizational, and technological issues.

The first glance at the table of contents may put you off. It is probably too crowded... But be certain that you won't find another book out there with this depth of practical and no-nonsense knowledge and applied techniques.

--- If you are buying just one book on customer complaints, get this one!