One of the biggest fears faced by new small business owners and people aspiring to start a business is having to handle customer complaints, often from people who might even be angry and obstreperous. It’s something that nobody particularly wants to deal with or to happen to them.

But like it or not, if you own a business you’ll definitely get complaints at some point. And likewise, you’ll get your fair share of returns and requests for refunds. It’s a fact of business life, and you won’t be able to escape it, because it’s impossible to please all of the people all of the time.

But there is something about getting customer complaints and requests for returns that can be a blessing in disguise. That is because the vast majority of unsatisfied customers don’t complain at all.

Now before you start breathing a sigh of relief, you must realise that having unsatisfied customers who don’t complain to you is actually bad news for your business. Because what these people do instead is pack their bags and take their custom somewhere else, and you won’t have the foggiest idea why they’ve done it.

What every business needs is customers who complain. Yes, that’s right, you should be grateful when they do, and it should be viewed as an invaluable gift to your enterprise. Customers who complain help you to find weaknesses in your products and in your standards of service. And these are weaknesses that you need to fix.

Customer complaints give you the raw, honest feedback about real things and real problems that are happening out at the coalface of your business. A lot of businesses will even hire expensive consultants to find out about these weaknesses, while your complaining customers will do it for free.

And this is where you can find a real key to breeding ultra-loyal customers, because unhappy customers are ideally positioned to become the most loyal of all. Why is this?

Because their expectations are at their lowest.

At the point when someone complains to you, they probably already view you as the lowest form of life on the planet. They won’t be expecting any extra-special treatment from you, but when you do give them this treatment, you’ll actually take the wind right out of their sails and surprise them. In the most pleasant way possible.

Grabbing the opportunity to find a way to go the extra mile for a complaining customer is one of the most important loyalty-building strategies you can ever use.

You see, it’s not product defects that destroy customer satisfaction. It’s how you react to and deal with defects and complaints that will ultimately define your customers’ satisfaction levels.

Your standard of customer service is only as good as the way you react when your back is against the wall and facing an unhappy, dissatisfied or even angry customer.

In fact, studies have been carried out that have shown that the most loyal customers of all are not the ones who have never experienced a problem with a business they buy from, but the ones who have experienced a problem with a product or service that they bought, and then received fantastic customer service as a result.

That is something that every small business owner should seriously think about.