GPI 109 – Offer an inside complaint person assigned to your drivers – let them call in to yield market info.

If you ask your truck drivers to write anything the customers said, you will get virtually no comments.  Why?  You will not get written comments because few people want to write.  They will take as long as you like to tell you verbally but forget the paper and pen.

Do not bother to ask for written comments; you won’t get them.  For this simple reason, assign someone internal to write customer complaints.  Getting the comments is more important than who wrote them down.  Make it easy and simple to report customer comments.  Assign an internal person who is easy to talk to, encouraging in nature and a person everyone likes.  Have this person take the call and document the problem with the details and this in itself will invite a lot more suggestions and comments stemming from our employees who deal directly with customers.

Do not forget why you are asking.  What is the most important thing to obtain?  You want customer feedback and comments which are invaluable to any company that wants to understand its customers.  For this, make it the easiest thing in the world to get comments.  Forcing a person who normally does not write to document something is a very bad idea.  You will know this as soon as you ask him and he does not reply.

Make reporting easy; assign it to someone that is easy to reach.  Assign them to an internal person who is very easy to talk with, and ask that all issues from the customer be reported to this person who will take the facts and report them.  The reporting employee is much more likely to call and report issues than to write them down, especially if they experience multiple events with customers.

Ask these questions of your assigned drivers:

1. If you relayed customer comments or complaints to your inside sales personnel, did you have a feeling that no one did anything about what you said?  If so, did you at any time stop telling them your comments?
2. In the past, when you had problems getting someone to take your customer comments seriously, who was the person?  If you do not want to identify the person, would you at least identify the department?
3. From now on, if we give you an alternative (second) person to follow up, would you let them know the comments also?  Note:  this person will be assigned to follow up and give you, the truck driver, some feedback and hopefully get the issues resolved for the customer.
4. Tell me what we can do to change the way the reporting system works now which would encourage you to relate comments every day?  What do you want changed?
5. Do you think it would help if we gave you someone outside the sales department to report to in order to get customer comments addressed?  Note:  You do not care who records the feedback, just get it.