Zero Complaints: The Path to Continuous Value Creation

Zero Complaints: The Path to Continuous Value Creation is the ONLY book that lays out the importance for organizations to ensure their customers do not have a need to complain and share their frustrations with other customers. The book shows why customers complain and how these complaints create huge problems for organizations, including limiting their growth, increasing unnecessary costs, contributing to customer churn, and upsetting employees. The book also calculates the enormous costs of complaints that can be saved in a Zero Complaints world. The book then goes on to describe processes and technologies that can identify and address the underlying reasons for those complaints, as well as the organizational changes required and mandated to provide continuous improvements. In addition to providing a series of how-to recommendations, the book also includes a wide range of examples from many companies and organizations around the world that have successfully embarked on the path to achieving Zero Complaints, using the Zero Defects learnings and going towards Zero Problems. This book will change management thinking.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction: Seeking the Zero. Chapter 2: Why do People Complain? Complaint Management is better than Complaint Handling. Chapter 3: Are Complaints being Rectified? Chapter 4: Zero Complaints? No Problem! Chapter 5: Costs and Returns of Zero Complaints. Chapter 6: Companies Should Ask: Is this Complaint Rectification Cost Avoidable? Chapter 7: Use Existing Techniques to Move Towards Zero Complaints. Chapter 8: Implementing Zero Complaints. Chapter 9: Technologies to get to Zero Complaints. Chapter 10: Getting to ZERO: Where to Go From Here. Chapter 11: The Way Forward: Rx for Zero Complaints. APPENDIX I: Costs and Returns. APPENDIX II: More on Customer Circles. Appendix III: Circle of Promises. Appendix IV: Value Creation.

About the Author :
Gautam Mahajan, President of Customer Value Foundation, is the global thought leader in Customer Value and Value Creation. He mentors the Value Creation Alliance, CreatingValue.co and is Editor of the Journal of Creating Value, jcv.sagepub.com. He is helping Value creation centers in Denmark, Portugal FAU and at U of Maryland, and a Value School at Kobe U and one at The Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology along with the Value Research Centre at Doshisha University in Japan. He is also an inventor with products being used around the world and holds has 18 US patents. Gautam ran businesses for a Fortune 50 company in the USA for 17 years and has developed leaders, CEOs and executives; consulted for Alcoa, DuPont, Continental Can, Reynolds, GE, GTE, ITC, Sealed Air, Azelis, Tatas, Birlas, Godrej, ITC, Toyo- Seikan, Viag, Solvay, Husky and Sidel. He is author of 8 books: Customer Value Investment, Value Dominant Logic, The Value Imperative, Total Customer Value Management, Customer Value Starvation, Creating Value for Leaders and How Creating Customer Value Can Make you a Great Executive.Among his honours is a Fellowship from Harvard Business School and Illinois Institute of Technology. He was honoured by the Illinois Institute of Technology with its Distinguished Alumni award in 2001. Bill Price forged his passion for delivering great customer experiences while serving as Amazon’s 1st Worldwide VP of Customer Service beginning in early 1999. Before that, he honed the processes with McKinsey & Company, a bleeding-edge IVR service bureau, and MCI Telecommunications where he created its Call Center Services division. Co-author of three books including The Frictionless Organization (2022), a frequent speaker to over 220 groups in 52 countries over the past 26 years and chair of the 30-company Global Operations Council whose active members include Costco, Hawaiian Airlines, MetLife Insurance, Motorola. Nike, Starbucks, and UnitedHealth Group. He is currently President of Driva Solutions serving more than 150 clients including American Express, Apple, Google, Hyatt, McDonalds, T-Mobile, and Vodafone, and co-founder of the 9-country LimeBridge Global Alliance. Dr. Moshe Davidow fell in love with complaint handling after reading a TARP report on the bottom-line benefits of consumer education. He set up Israel's first modern complaint department in 1980 and was able to show an ROI of 177%. Realizing how much about complaint handling was still unknown, he received his PhD. from Texas A&M University in 1998, with a dissertation entitled 'Organizational Responses to Customer Complaints and Their Impact on Post-Complaint Customer Behavior". He has spent the last 25 years researching the field of complaint management as a strategic resource to the firm and calls it the customer-centric compass of an organization. He has been an adjunct lecturer at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology for the past 20 years and has been associated with the Journal of Creating Value for the past 10 years.

Review :
Mahajan, Davidow, and Price have provided clear arguments why and how organizations need to achieve zero complaints and zero problems to earn their customers’ trust and loyalty, and create more value. You will move from zero defects to zero complaints after this compelling read. A must book for business leaders! Hermann Simon, Founder and Honorary Chairman of Simon-Kucher The concept of Zero Complaints is not a goal. It’s a strategy that impacts your bottom line. The authors reveal the huge costs and benefits of proactively solving customer problems to avoid handling them in the first place. This book is filled with solid ideas, strategies, and tactics that all leaders need to consider. This is what gets customers to say, “I’ll Be Back.” Shep Hyken, New York Times bestselling author of The Amazement Revolution Gautam Mahajan, Bill Price and Moshe Davidow make the case that we should move beyond the producer mindset of zero defects, to the customer centric one of zero complaints. They explain the manifold ways in which this pays off and also describe the journey to becoming a truly customer centric company, a timeless theme which should be of interest to all business managers and leaders. Martin Reeves, Chair of BCG Henderson Institute Indian companies were accustomed to a fairly protected market where customers had little choice and no incentive to complain and get a resolution.Things are changing fast and we are now moving to a much freer market where the customer has several choices. In this context it is imperative for companies/organisations to move to a zero complaints situation. The book gives in much detail how this can be done. It may seem difficult at first glance, but the authors have provided enough examples of the way to achieve zero complaints. Arvind Pande Former Chairman of SAIL, Steel Authority of India Ltd. Bill Price has teamed up with industry veterans Gautam Mahajan and Moshe Davidow to produce another timely guide to improve customer experience. In Zero Complaints, the authors clearly state why customers complain, challenge if complaints are being rectified or glossed over, and then recommend specific processes and organizational approaches to strive for zero complaints. Their solid ROI arguments will enable CEOs and other executives to change their companies’ mindsets and put into place lasting new strategies. You will nod in agreement, cringe at their bad examples, and be able to apply new techniques right away! Scott Wesson Senior Vice President, Chief Digital Officer, UDR