Managing customer dissatisfaction: turning lemons into lemonades

Complaints of poor service delivery, unwelcoming attitudes, preferential customer treatment, and the ironical national productivity level of 25 percent against the international benchmark of 75 percent are but common features of our mundane individual and organised lives. Companies, which do not embrace the ideals and virtues of good customer service by not committing themselves to an annual Customer Satisfaction Index, are counted out of the rat race for productivity improvement. However, despite all these initiatives and passionate reforms, customer dissatisfaction and low productivity remain every investor's primary concern.

At this juncture, judging by known and unknown cases, reality is beginning to knock on the door of the traditional "Customer Satisfaction Approach"; rather than improving service delivery and enhancing client satisfaction; it achieves the opposite effect of entrenching embedded negative attitudes and watering the tree of complacency.