CBC MARKETPLACE: SERVICES » CUSTOMER SERVICE
Insider interview: B.L. Ochman, professional complainer
Broadcast: February 20, 2005
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B.L. Ochman, 'professional complainer.'

The following is an edited excerpt from an interview between Clifton Joseph (Marketplace reporter) and "professional complainer" B.L. Ochman.

The interview

CLIFTON JOSEPH: So you call yourself a professional complainer – why is that; what do you do?

B.L. OCHMAN: I get paid to complain for other people… I used to have a company called Rent-a-Kvetch, which was consumer complaint-–

JOSEPH: –-Rent-a-Kvetch?

OCHMAN: Yes. A kvetch is a Yiddish word for a complainer, it’s somebody who just keeps complaining until they get what they wanted.

JOSEPH: And you’re that type?

OCHMAN: Yeah.

JOSEPH: Who would you complain for?

OCHMAN: I complain for everybody from corporate executives to little old ladies. About everything from Tootsie Roll pops with no tootsie in the centre, to lemon automobiles and broken refrigerators, and companies that didn’t do what they were supposed to do for people.

JOSEPH: Can everyone complain effectively?

OCHMAN: Some people are not constitutionally suited to complaining… You have to be willing to insist on what you want, and a lot of people are not comfortable doing that, particularly Canadians.

JOSEPH: Why, because Canadians are supposed to be so polite?

OCHMAN: Yeah, that’s your reputation.

JOSEPH: Who’s more predisposed to complaining, loud mouths?

OCHMAN: Not necessarily, and I don’t think they would be the most effective either. You have to be calm, cool and collected and you have to know what you want – and what you’re going to do if you don’t get what you want. So being loud or abusive doesn’t help you.

JOSEPH: That seems like what most people would do as their first thing–-

OCHMAN: That’s why most people fail.

JOSEPH: So 'be calm' is one of the first tips then. How do you manoeuvre between being angry – because you still have to have some of that anger, but at the same time, you don’t want to push it too far. Where is that line?

OCHMAN: It’s a fine line, it really is. You certainly can’t curse, because what they teach them in customer service school is, if somebody curses, say 'I’m going to terminate this call because you curse.'

The instant that somebody picks up the phone, you have to say, ‘How do you do? May I have your name?’ And if you don’t get the last name, you have a problem to begin with.

Then you say, ‘Okay, what’s you employee number?’ And the person will usually tell you that.

The only people who won’t tell you their names are hookers and people that don’t want to be held accountable of what they’re going to say. So you know what kind of situation you’re dealing with if they won’t tell you their name.

And then you say, ‘To whom to you report?’ So right away they know that you’re serious, and if they don’t want to tell you that, you’ve got a big problem.

JOSEPH: You know who they are, and you know who their bosses are?

OCHMAN: Right, so that if you need to escalate [your complaint] right away, you can. And then, after you say what you’re calling about, then you either get it resolved to your satisfaction or you don’t. You have to write down everything that was said.

JOSEPH: What are some of the successes that you’ve had?

OCHMAN: Well, I’m successful pretty much all the time when I’ve complained. I got as new refrigerator, I got a new washing machine for someone, I got new mattresses for two people who had defective mattresses, I resolved a landlord tenant complaint, a couple of different people got new cars when the ones they had were lemons.

The guy with the Twinkies? It’s one of my favourites. He would go out running, and when one day he reaches up there, he gets his Twinkie, he opens it up, there’s no filling in the middle. Opens up another one, there’s no filling the middle. Opens up another one, there’s no filling in the middle. He got this whole box where there was no creamy stuff in the middle, and he said ‘That just won’t do.’

He had seen me on TV, so he called me up and he said ‘I want to write a letter, I want to complain.’ They sent him a carton of Twinkies, a carton of boxes of Twinkies.

JOSEPH: How did you do that? Was it just an easy thing to do, you pick up a phone or you write a letter?

OCHMAN: No, I never pick up the phone. I really think the phone is an ineffective way to complain. I always go right to the top and I always let it filter back down to where it should be handled to begin with.

When you use the phone, other people have the ultimate weapon: they can hang up on you… And there’s no record that you called. So it’s best to write a letter…

The people that are charged with dealing with customers unfortunately tend to be minimum wage people stuck in really horrible jobs, or they’re in a call centre with somebody at their elbow, and they have a quota of how many people they have to talk to in a day, and how soon they have to get off the phone. They’re miserable. That’s not who should be talking to customers. Executives should be talking to customers.

You know, highly trained, well-paid people should talk to customers – because frankly, without customers, no one would have to come to work anymore. Customers are the most valuable thing a company could have. Yet people are treated like dirt on a very regular basis. So they want somebody to listen to them. Mostly, they want people to say ‘That’s terrible. Let’s see what we ca do about that.’

When was the last time somebody said that to you when you were complaining about something? Usually they say, ‘That’s funny, no one else has complained about that.’ Why do I care? I’m complaining about it, why do I care what anybody else said. But that’s what they say, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever heard about that.’

First of all, I bet it’s not. But secondly, so what? I’m an early warning system, 1,000 other people are going to come with this same problem. Take care of me. That’s what people want.

JOSEPH: Most people have some idea that when you call to complain, ask for the supervisor.

OCHMAN: If you are complaining on the phone, which again I highly, highly, highly recommend against, if you’re complaining on the telephone, as soon as the person picks up the phone, say ‘Good morning, I’d like to have your name.’

And they say, ‘My name is John.’ ‘John, do you have a last name?’ ‘Oh we don’t give out last names, that’s against company policy.’ ‘John, do you have an employee number?’ John always has an employee number, and if John won’t give you his name, his last name, or his employee number, you have a problem and you should immediately hang up the phone and deal with it in writing.

When John tells you his name and his employee number, you say ‘John, to whom to you report?’ And he tells you that person’s name, and you say ‘Thank you very much.’ And then John knows you’re serious, that you’re going to talk to his boss – or his boss’s boss.

JOSEPH: It seems a lot of work, that you have to play this game, you have to moderate your anger, moderate how you approach it.

OCHMAN: I’ll tell you, one day I was in a stereo store, because this receiver that I bought had broken for the third time. I was really upset. The first two times, they gave me a loaner, and I waited, and they finally fixed it and it came back to me. The third time I went in, they didn’t want to give me a loaner. And I just lost it on them. I started screaming, and I started yelling, and I got thrown out of the store.

And there I was standing on Broadway with my broken receiver, and I thought ‘I didn’t get what I wanted, I didn’t handle that very well.’

I still had a broken receiver, and nowhere to go to get it fixed. The point is, if you’re going to get what you want, it is a game. And if you play it well, you’ll always get what you want, and if you don’t, you won’t. It’s your choice.

JOSEPH: One doesn’t assume that the head of a corporation is sitting there waiting by the phone. We’re taught to believe that they’re busy, time is money, and they’re out there making it; that it’s hard to get to them or get to their representatives.

OCHMAN: It’s very hard to get to them, but it’s not at all hard to get to their secretaries... It’s very unlikely that you’re going to get the chairman of the board on the phone, or the president, but you will get his or her secretary, and that person is charged with making things happen. If they call customer service and say ‘Take care of this person,’ trust me when I tell you’ll get taken care of.

JOSEPH: You’re sort of going to the top to get to the bottom, where the action is?

OCHMAN: Yes.

JOSEPH: Why don’t more people know this?

OCHMAN: I don’t know why people don’t know how to complain effectively, I just know that they don’t. That’s why I had a business for ten years where people said ‘Handle this for me.’ People, (a) they don’t like to complain; and (b) they don’t like to be disappointed.

Let me tell you how Canadians complain, all right? Canadians say ‘Ohh, gee, I got this product, and now it’s broken, and maybe you could replace it or maybe you could help me.’ Well, no one’s going to help you when you sound like that.

You can’t be ‘maybe… if you could be so kind.’ Baloney. They sold you something that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, and they owe you something that does what it’s supposed to do. It’s that simple. Right away, you have a right to complain. They’re wrong. You’re right. And you just have to start out by being assertive.

New Yorkers have a reputation for being, shall we say, more assertive than other people.

JOSEPH: Why is that do you think?

OCHMAN: Oh God, just to get down the street in this city you have to assert yourself.

JOSEPH: But I don’t know, sometimes one might not want to complain.

OCHMAN: You have to pick your battles, you really can’t argue or complain about everything. There are some things that are worth fighting over and there are some things that aren’t. But if you’re in a restaurant where there’s a fly in your soup and they don’t fall all over themselves, you should not eat there.

JOSEPH: Have you gotten tired of complainers? I mean you’re out of the business now, right? And after you’ve heard so many people come and complain, do you at some point say ‘I’m tired of hearing y’all complaining to me?’

OCHMAN: Yeah, that’s exactly what I said. After a while I had just had enough and didn’t want to hear it anymore. I felt like I’d helped hundreds of people, I did my thing… I went on to other things. But I often think I should write a book, because these are things people need to know, so I’m thinking about it.

I don’t have time anymore, but will I fight against injustice and shoddy service for the rest of my days? You bet. That’s just who I am. I’m a kvetch.

JOSEPH: But you’re also just a natural born complainer right?

OCHMAN: My mother says so. Yeah, I just have a skill for it…

JOSEPH: People who don’t complain… is it partly that we’ve gotten used to not getting a fair shake?

OCHMAN: I think that’s true. I think mediocrity has become the norm and they accept it. Well, I don’t think you should do that, I think you should demand to get what you pay for… If nobody ever complains, mediocrity is perpetuated. That’s really the bottom line... If nobody complains, then that kind of service and that kind of mediocrity continues.You have to complain.

JOSEPH: Why are companies so unconcerned about bad publicity, or about servicing the people that buy in their establishments?

OCHMAN: Beats me, it’s about the dumbest thing that they could do. It would not cost them as much to just do what they say they’re going to do as it does to advertise and to get people into the store.

If you look at the average customer in a supermarket, that person’s not worth the $3 package of bad meat that she just bought. She ought to have $50,000 tattooed on her head so you knew that that customer, over time, was probably worth $50,000 to you.

When you look at the cost of getting a customer, as opposed to the cost of keeping a customer, it’s just bizarre that companies don’t do a better job of customer service. I don’t why.

JOSEPH: Back to the whole question of anger… When you say that you’ve got to go at these companies, be firm, stern, but at the same time, not too much over the line – what is that line? How do you moderate that urge to just loud mouth somebody?

OCHMAN: The line is when you could be arrested for your behaviour; until then you’re cool [laughs] … No throwing things. When somebody’s screaming and yelling, they’re not making sense most of the time. And even if they are making sense, it’s much more threatening to stay calm than it is to scream and yell. Somebody who’s lost it is not much of a threat.

JOSEPH: You’re a letters person. Why?

OCHMAN: Because there’s a paper trail, somebody has to do something about that. You make a phone call, they hang up, there’s no record of the fact that you called. You’re in the store complaining, they say ‘I didn’t talk to him, I don’t know what you’re talking about...’

If you write a letter, somebody has to do something. But it’s not enough to just write a letter, you have to send copies of that letter to people who can adversely affect the company.

JOSEPH: We’ve haven’t gotten our soup… [the waiter] might have forgotten. Now, what is it that you could get out of this? It’s a simple mistake, but it’s customer service, you didn’t get what you –

OCHMAN: I’d be very careful about complaining to somebody who’s going to touch my food. If I was going to make any complaints about anything, it would be on the way out while I was paying the bill. But given the fact that this person could do God knows what to your food between the kitchen and here, this is a situation where I wouldn’t do a lot of complaining. I might politely say to him ‘excuse me, we ordered soup’ but I don’t think that I would go much further than that.

You have to pick your battles. If we were on our way out, I might say to the maitre’d, ‘Hey, the guy forgot our soup… don’t you think there should be something you would do about that?’

OCHMAN: These days, with the Internet people have much more effective ways of complaining than they had in the past, and companies should be paying attention to stuff like that

… There are many different sites on the internet where people give their opinion of products and experience with companies, and millions of people now before they shop, they go online and they see what’s been said about a company. And if it’s really bad news, a lot of times, they might not buy that product.

A company that is paying attention now, particularly a big company, needs to be looking at what’s being said about them online, no just disgruntled customers walking out of the store, but what do those people do after they leave the store.

It’s very serious from the point of view of what can happen to a company’s reputation. It’s a whole other area of concern, but consumers are getting more and more power, if they can spread what they think on the internet, and it can travel around the world very quickly.

JOSEPH: There used to be a time where the consumer was king. You go into an establishment and it’s like ‘can I help you ma’am? Can I help you sir?’ What happened?

OCHMAN: Companies, they look at it as impossible for them to maintain customer service – whereas the last thing a company should cut is its customer service. That’s its competitive edge. But I guess some of it is economic, and some of it is just mediocrity. Mediocrity abounds, unfortunately. Try and find somebody to help you in most stores, they’re not there…

Look on a lot of websites, you’ll never find a phone number, you’ll never find the name of a human being to contact. What are they afraid of? They’re afraid that people are going to complain. Well, people are going to find their way to get what they want said, whether or not they not they can say it to you. I have no idea; I am mystified by why companies are less responsive.

JOSEPH: It seems like it’s easy to target them, easy to spread bad new, easy to tell your friends not to shop there.

OCHMAN: Absolutely, and one disgruntled customer is going to talk to ten of their friends who are going to talk to ten of their friends… People do listen to their friends when it comes to purchasing things.

A customer complaint is a positive thing. It’s an early warning system a lot of the time. For every person that writes a letter, 100 people feel that way. Companies should be paying attention.

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