Okay, I admit it, I write a lot of these, some for clients and quite a few for myself. Usually, they help you blow off some steam, but I tend to see complaint letter writing as an art form, it’s important not to come across all superior, but it’s still important to be assertive.
1) Go on their website and see if they have a complaints procedure. Refer to it in your letter, they know that you’re serious that way.
2) Never be aggressive, rude or demanding, someone at the other end gets £6 per hour to respond to these letters, and they don’t really care what happened, your only recourse is to be pleasant.
3) Before you start writing, map out for yourself a simple A, B, C of the points of your complaint like this:
A) It took 60 minutes before we were able to order
B) There was a maggot in my salad.
C) The service was appalling
4) Then use a single paragraph to describe what went wrog. Be factual but add some tasty words at the end of each paragraph explaining why they’ve left themselves down.
* This simply isn’t the standard we’ve come to expect from XXXX Hotels
* We know that La Blah de Blah Restaurant is one of the best in town, but can’t understand why we received such dreadful service
* This is the third vehicle my company has hired from you and they are usually of a high standard, this was not up to scratch at all.
5) Keep it proportionate, if your chips were cold, don’t be bombastic and say you’re disgusted with their cuisine, tell them their chips were cold and the floor was dirty.
6) Tell them what you want and remind them why. I would like to be reimbursed for my journey as the aggressive behaviour of Andrew, your Train Manager ruined my entire trip, leaving me stressed on arrival at my destination.
7) Tell them how they can reach you.
8 ) If you want to push their buttons, you can use a question that I sometimes use if I know they won’t do anything about my complaint, but I want to see them squirm a little bit. ‘Do you treat all of your disabled(or put in your own word here) customers this way?’ It’s a trap, if they say No, that means they treat SOME of them that way, and they can’t really say YES. They will undoubtedly ignore the question, but it will get their attention.
I’ll be honest with you, we live in a society where companies don’t really care about complaints, it’s just something to deal with in the day. But as word of mouth travel, as choice opens up, when a company doesn’t take our complaints seriously, we can take our business elsewhere.
*Thanks to Virgin Trains & particularly a Train Manager from Wolverhampton for inspiring this blog.
