Try a Triage Approach to Customer Complaints

Recently, I had the privilege of being a keynote speaker on customer experience at a company’s quarterly event. Following the speech, the CEO shared an insight into their approach to customer service and CX, comparing it to a medical emergency room. “Our response to handling customer complaints and issues is akin to triage,” he said. “We effectively diagnose the problems, yet find ourselves treating similar cases repeatedly as if sending them to an emergency room that never addresses the underlying causes.”

Triage is an interesting word. It’s a medical term, but I wanted to better understand the definition, so I did what most people do. I Googled the word!