A Complaint Is a Gift, 2nd Edition

9 It’s All in the WordsResponding to Written Complaints

It’s easy for customers to threaten that they’ll write letters after receiving bad service. But writing is not without cost. In order to write complaint letters, customers have to gather paper, a pen, an envelope, a stamp—or a computer—and their wits. Depending on how rapidly they write, this could take somewhere between ten and thirty minutes. People who write with lots of details tell us they have on occasion spent hours composing their letters. They may have to go to a Web site and enter ...