Here is an excerpt from an article written by Lohyd Terrier and Béatrice Schaad Noble for MIT Sloan Management Review. To read the complete article, check out others, sign up for email alerts, and obtain subscription information, please click here.
Illustration Credit: Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images
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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.
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’ personal experiences (and those of employees as well) 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 excessive and 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 entire process for scheduling surgical appointments and to install clear verification checkpoints to prevent other patients from experiencing the same miscommunication.
Over a 29-month period from 2021 to 2024, CHUV developed 17 projects based on testimonials from patients, relatives, and professionals. Projects ranged from reducing wait times for elderly patients to improving the information-sharing process for families experiencing a tragic event.
Those examples highlight a simple truth: When complaints are treated as data, not disruptions, organizations can respond more quickly, learn more, and improve their services.
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