Originally Posted by
PWMTrav
That's only partially true. I've worked or consulted for a lot of large companies, and a common universal thread that I always go looking for is that communication gap. Sometimes it's just internal, but it's shocking how many companies have management who have no idea what their customers think or feel.
IMHO, it's always worth putting the communication through the regular channels, but a follow up to a higher level contact doesn't hurt if you don't get a response. I wouldn't start up top and work my way down, though, because even if you do reach an exec directly, he/she will first go ask the department that handles such things what they've attempted to do to fix. If they've never heard of you, the exec isn't going to step in on your behalf, he's just going to hand over your letter and say handle this.
Yes, these folks have admins that read/screen most of their email, but most want to see the complaints. The admin might check with customer relations first and give it to them if they haven't done anything, though.
Start with the normal channels, but have an escalation path if you don't get a response.
Which is why, as my thread makes clear, most well-run companies do some form of random pull for their senior people and that is done from the CRM database. In that way, senior people do not get bogged down in the minutiae of whether any one customer is treated right, but they get a sense of what concerns customers and how those concerns are generally handled.
A well run CRM system should be kicking out "appeals" from what the customer considers first-tier bad decisions to second-tier managers and then random samples up the food chain. No one bad thing is necessarily caught, but if every first tier CS agent knows that there is the chance that any given complaint and the agent's response winds up on the CEO's desk, there is an incentive to do the right thing.
That said, the fight on FT is often about what is the "right thing".