How Do I Eliminate Customer & Employee Complaints Permanently?

Two Headlines, One Problem

Last week, two stories from opposite sides of the world caught my attention, and I think they’re really the same story.

In Canada, the Commission for Complaints for Telecom-television Services (CCTS) reported on October 21 that it has received 53,195 complaints so far this complaint period. That’s up 79% from the year before. The most common issues weren’t exotic. Incorrect charges, poor disclosure, service problems, and price increases. The kind of things a Customer shouldn’t have to call about once, let alone often enough to go to an outside agency.

The day before, Singapore’s financial regulator, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, published findings from its review of how banks and insurers handle complaints. The core issue found: firms were resolving individual disputes without looking hard enough at what caused them. MAS wants companies to stop treating each resolved case as the end of the matter. It also flagged that quickly resolved complaints often weren’t being recorded at all, which means the patterns stay invisible.

That second point is the one I’d underline. A lot of companies are actually pretty good at handling complaints. Far fewer are good at making sure the same complaint doesn’t happen again.

Can You Really Eliminate Complaints Permanently?

Let me be honest about the title. As long as you have Customers and Employees, something will go wrong. A shipment will be late. A system will crash. Someone will have a bad day.

But there’s a big difference between a complaint that happens once and the same complaint that shows up every week. The second kind is almost always a sign that you’re fixing the moment rather than the cause. And that kind, in my experience, you can get rid of for good.

Fixing the Person vs. Fixing the System

Here’s what usually happens. A Customer calls about an incorrect charge. A great team member apologizes, issues a credit, and maybe even goes above and beyond. The Customer hangs up happy. Everyone feels good.

Then, tomorrow, another Customer calls about the exact same charge.

The service recovery was excellent. The problem is that nobody went upstream to find out why the charge was wrong in the first place. So the company ends up paying for the same mistake over and over, in credits, in call volume, in Employee burnout, and, eventually, in lost Customers.

Employee Complaints Follow the Same Pattern

This isn’t only a Customer issue. When Employees keep raising the same frustration, whether it’s a clunky system, a confusing policy, or a schedule that never works, and nothing changes, two things tend to happen. They stop bringing it up, and they start looking for a new job.

I’d also point out that your frontline Employees are usually the first people to know what Customers are about to complain about. They hear it every day. If their complaints are ignored, you lose your best early-warning system.

How to Stop the Same Complaints From Coming Back

This is a big part of what we work on with clients through The DiJulius Group’s X-Commandment Methodology. Here’s how we’d approach it.

1. Capture Every Complaint, Even the Easy Ones

If a team member fixes a problem in 30 seconds, it often goes unwritten. That’s exactly what MAS flagged, and I’d guess it’s happening in most organizations. Make it simple for anyone to log a complaint, and make sure the quick fixes count too. You can’t spot a pattern you never recorded.

2. Find Your Top Recurring Service Defects

Pull the last 90 days of Customer and Employee complaints and sort them by theme. In most companies, a handful of issues account for a large share of the volume. Those are your targets.

This is where our Zero Risk approach comes in. The idea is simple: identify the service defects most likely to occur, then decide in advance how you’ll handle them.

3. Give Every Defect Two Fixes

For each recurring complaint, build two things:

• A recovery protocol. What every team member is empowered to do, right away, to make it right for the Customer. No hunting for a manager.
• A root-cause owner. One person who is responsible for figuring out why it keeps happening and fixing the process, system or policy behind it, with a date attached.

The recovery protocol takes care of today’s Customer. The root-cause owner takes care of tomorrow.

4. Lock It In With Never & Always Standards

Once you’ve fixed the cause, write it into your Never & Always standards so it doesn’t drift back. For example: “We never charge a Customer for a fee that wasn’t clearly disclosed up front,” or “We always confirm the final price in writing before the Customer commits.”

5. Go Looking for Employee Complaints

Most leaders wait for Employee complaints to come to them. I’d suggest going the other way. We wrote about this in Are You Getting Enough Complaints?, and the idea is that silence from your team usually isn’t a good sign. Ask regularly what’s getting in their way. Then, and this is the part that gets skipped, tell them what you changed because of what they said. Closing the loop is what makes people willing to speak up next time.

6. Measure Repeat Complaints, Not Just Total Complaints

Total complaint volume can go up or down for lots of reasons. The number I’d watch more closely is how often the same issue comes back. If your repeat rate is falling, you’re actually fixing things. If it isn’t, you’re probably just getting faster at apologizing.

Where to Start This Week

1. Pull your top five Customer complaints and top five Employee complaints from the last 90 days.
2. Circle the ones that showed up more than once. Those are your real priorities.
3. Assign one root-cause owner to each, with a date.
4. Write a recovery protocol so your frontline team can make it right in the meantime.
5. Tell your team what you’re fixing and why. It costs nothing, and it shows them that their feedback matters.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you eliminate recurring customer complaints?

Treat each repeat complaint as a symptom of a broken process, not just a moment to recover. Record every complaint, group them by theme, assign an owner to fix the underlying cause, and track whether the same issue comes back.

What is the difference between service recovery and root-cause fixing?

Service recovery makes it right for the Customer in front of you. Root cause fixing ensures the next Customer never experiences the problem. Most organizations need both, but many do only the first.

How can I reduce employee complaints?

Ask for them regularly, make it safe to raise them, act on the patterns, and tell Employees what changed as a result. Unaddressed Employee complaints often show up later as turnover and as Customer complaints.

What is the Zero Risk approach to customer service?

Zero Risk is a DiJulius Group concept for identifying the service defects most likely to happen and putting protocols in place ahead of time, so team members know exactly how to make it right when something goes wrong.

The Bottom Line

You’ll probably never get to zero complaints, and I’d be a little suspicious of any company that claims it has. But you can get to a place where the same complaint doesn’t keep coming back. That’s when your team stops spending its days apologizing and starts spending them creating great experiences.

If you’d like help finding and fixing the recurring issues in your organization, let’s talk. Or consider sending your leaders through our Customer Experience Executive Academy, where this is part of what we work on together.

Sources

• Telecom complaints up nearly 80%, CCTS says, MobileSyrup, October 21, 2026
• Singapore Regulator Calls for Broader Reviews of Customer Complaints, Court Cast, on MAS findings published October 20, 2026