Sunday, December 6, 2015

Making a Complaint

The law is a very blunt instrument. Not every legally viable claim should be pursued. Even if you have been in some way wronged by a business it may not make any sense to go to Court. Imagine you had a dreadful meal at a restaurant or you ordered a cab and it came a half hour late – in theory you might be able to sue for damages but so to do would be silly. The cost of suing would outweigh any recovery by a thousand fold and a judge could see your suit as merely a foolish waste of Court time.

So what can you do?

There are options.

One is to chalk it up to experience and forget about it. If you have choices you can not go back to the restaurant where you had a bad meal or you can use a different cab company next time but beyond that you can ignore the problem happened and move on.

The other option is to make a complaint.

Writing a complaint may get you some relief, change the way the business that harmed you carries on and, at the least, allows you to vent a little (but very little as we shall see).

So how to make a complaint?

It's best to make a complaint in writing. That gives you clarity and also allows you to say what you have to without interruption. People getting complaints in person often get defensive and things degenerate into an argument.

The complaint should be short, specific and very clear.

Begin by saying "I am writing to complaint about [whatever] that happened last [date and time as best you can say]". Explain exactly what happened – in the cab situation you could say "I had to wait over half an hour for the taxi to arrive". Then describe how this caused you a problem – it made you late for work or the bad meal spoiled the birthday event or whatever.

Finally, say what you want and ask for a reply within a fixed period of time – say ten days. What you ask for should be reasonable – say a refund of what you paid or some free service. If you ask for $500 because you cab was a bit late you won't get it. But if you ask for the next ride to two to be free you likely will get something.

You complaint should be polite and focus on the failing rather than the business. Don't send the complaint to people outside the business (local politicians and the like); the issue is between you and the business. Things go awry and the business likely didn't intend to cause you a problem. Focus on what went wrong and what you want and you will probably get a good reply.

Businesses take complaints seriously and they will respond to a polite and measured complaint in a positive way. And even if you don't get any compensation you will at least have the satisfaction of not taking this bad service lying down.

2 comments:

The Mound of Sound said...

Or you could go full-ISIS on their ass. That, apparently, gets everybody's attention.

Alien Contact said...

I have details about their gvmt. Apparently enforcement is 300x more important than is the theoretical blueprint and I need to learn a bit more about a few fields in the months ahead.
They hold something like a direct democracy (a DD is a tyranny) every-time one of the most one million of our people is temporarily incapacitated. Permanently is something else. Being drunk or withdrawing, or angry, or curably mentally ill...it takes one minute to read a page. Cognition is measured (of the page description). But even more important is to measure strong opinions; this can make a relatively powerless person's opinion 1000x more important. Apparently 3B of our 6.5B would on avg qualify. 99% wouldn't vote. The most powerful person would be one million times the weighting of the barely qualifying. The 1000th would still weigh 100000the least. The 100000th only 50x (is a dropoff at present).
So, Concumbere cum equus, what I can surmise is we should divide mental illnesses into those we can treat and those we can't (they've alluded age-related is less treatable). And we should find treatments for those that aren't presently treatable. And we should seek out and destroy Crown policies that lead to mental illnesses as long as the default is something less mentally ill. Apparently I'm the model for the weighting. I'm not sure what the enforcement mechanism is. My 2014 sensor network sucked, and my 2015 iteration is presently flawed...
The original Senate was to be more educated (than avg post-IR no spare-time workers) rich landowners. They've suggested WMD expertise; I suggest to be more educated is to have multiple degrees, or multiple files. Ideally a science/engineering and a humanity related to ethics.