Turn Customer Complaints Into Innovation Blueprints

You can reframe client grievances as an opportunity instead of a burden. At one Swiss hospital, complaints have become a pipeline for improvements to the customer experience.

- By Lohyd Terrier and Béatrice Schaad Noble

MOST ORGANIZATIONS TREAT customer complaints as a source of frustration to be contained, apologized for, and moved off the books as swiftly as possible. But what if those complaints are actually a practical source of innovation? In other words, what about treating complaints as an early-warning system and a free R&D lab?

This approach has been in place at the Vaud University Hospital (CHUV) in Switzerland for over a decade. Rather than sidelining grievances, leaders analyze them, learn from them, and implement fundamental changes. They don't downplay criticisms; instead, they use feedback as building blocks for making improvements. This is a model that organizations in other industries could also benefit from implementing.

To complement other quality-surveillance tools, such as customer satisfaction surveys, CHUV leaders began collecting complaints at a mediation center at the hospital. The entire customer experience is reflected in those complaints, which are rigorously filed and coded and have surfaced cross-silo breakdowns and uncertainty along with other issues. They cover aspects of customers’ experiences (and those of employees) but are likely to reflect difficulties that hundreds of other people are at risk of encountering.

Take, for example, the CHUV patient whose testimony led to the correction of a malfunction in the cancellation and rescheduling of surgical appointments. The customer had been discharged from the hospital after an operation and erroneously received a call the next day informing him that he was going to have surgery the following week. This call caused preventable anxiety because of the questions it raised for the patient: Did the doctors operate on the wrong person? Do I have a complication? This account led the department involved to review its process for scheduling surgical appointments and to install verification checkpoints to prevent other patients from experiencing the same miscommunication.