Handling customer complaints in style - the best marketing your money can buy?

We talked with Tero-Markus about recent personal and also common experiences with products and services. Earlier Pasi shared an Aussie blog post about how a particular Italian company handled customer's problem: http://www.groundswell.fi/sim/2013/04/10/this-is-how-you-create-advocates/

Tero-Markus made a brilliant observation and conclusion about the talks - in this age of digitally connected super fast social networks, the best marketing company can possibly buy/pay for is dealing with customer complaints in superb manner.  Quality of course has to be in order (so that this will not become too expensive), but that must be the case anyway in constantly more competitive markets.
Every complaint is an opportunity to
1. anchor the customer's loyalty
2. get the most convincing voice and message to social networks about the trust worthiness of the brand

Would be interesting to see if the real marketing ROI would improve in many cases if (big) part of brand's advertising budgets would be moved to customer care/service companies instead of eg display advertsing.

This should also actually include other operations in the company. An example - we filed a patent to US via big patent firm having small "starting" operations in Finland. Not to go into further details, these guys have done pretty much everything totally wrong when thinking of the bigger picture for their company in Finland - just for the sake of few thousand €s they have done everything to assure that our personal professional networks will at least not hear anything good on working with them. Instead of considering our disagreements as sort of marketing chance offering a powerful tool to market eg outstanding customer orientation to other start-ups and professionals in bigger companies they chose to, well,   twist and shout.



Taking also into account that every complaint is also a thread to loose the customer for ever and even worse make him/her as credible anti-advocate for your cause, this is really a no-brainer: investing in treating you customers superbly is money well spend in marketing.