Complaints shared publicly by CX, service, or marketing professionals — and framed as expertise — are often far less helpful than intended.
This article is part of our Customer Experience Hub: a collection of articles that explore the architecture, practices, and mindset behind great CX, all grounded in real-world teaching and consulting experience.
Complaints
Complaints provide a valuable window into real customer experiences.
When they come from real Customers:
- Surface friction.
- Reveal emotional truth.
- Create an opportunity to make things right.
But not all complaints are equally useful — especially when they are written by CX, marketing, or service professionals and published publicly as expert assessment.
After reading enough of these posts, a pattern emerges.
And with it, a set of recurring structural issues that limit their value — not just for organizations, but for the wider CX community trying to learn from them.
This article explores three of those issues.
1. When Complaints Encourage Venting, Not Solving
Many public complaints begin with a story—one where the author has suffered in some way.
What a terrible airline.
What an awful software provider.
What a misleading advertisement.
There is often emotion, sometimes even drama. As a result, these posts tend to attract agreement and validation.
But agreement isn’t the same thing as learning.
What’s harder — and far less common — is translating a frustrating experience into a lesson that helps others understand what might need to change.
That work requires moving beyond the moment itself and into questions of design, policy, trade-offs, and operating constraints.
Turning experience into insight is the work of CX professionals. Just amplifying the experience is not.
2. When Anecdote Becomes Conclusion
A second issue appears when a single interaction is treated as evidence of organizational failure or incompetence.
In research and CX work, we are careful not to extrapolate from one example to a broader system. An anecdote can illustrate a point — but it is not a reliable foundation for diagnosis.
This is also why, when we run client Mystery Shopper programs, I never take the role of a Mystery Shopper myself.
One experience—even my own—tells us very little about how a service system actually performs across time, channels, locations, and customer types.
A common trait in this sub-genre of public complaints is an extreme focus on what went wrong, combined with an overconfidence in diagnosing causes from the outside.
When the real causes — which can be complex — sit behind the curtain, inside the organization.
3. Complaining Isn’t a CX Superpower
Pointing out what went wrong is easy. Millions of real customers do it every day.
Understanding why it went wrong — and what would need to change for it not to happen again—is the harder, more valuable work. And because the CX ecosystem itself is complex, that work is rarely simple.
I’m often reminded of the restaurant critic Anton Ego in the film Ratatouille. Remember his severe black suit?
His reviews are respected because they are accurate, not emotional. Over the course of the film, he gains humility — and learns to recognize excellence when it appears.
In our Mystery Shopper work, we take a similar approach: sharing specifically what went well, what could be improved, and what could be considered for the future.
Insight comes from discernment, not judgment alone.
Moving from Complaint to Contribution
Complaining to the world can feel cathartic. We’ve all been there.
But when emotion outweighs context and diagnosis, it rarely helps people improve — inside organizations or across the profession.
Feeling better isn’t the same as making things better.
Thank You for Reading
I regularly share stories, strategies, and insights from our work in Contact Centers, Customer Service, and Customer Experience. If this resonates, I’d love to stay connected.
You can drop me a line anytime, or subscribe on our site.
Daniel Ord
[email protected]
www.omnitouchinternational.com
