Complaint

Don't you hate it when its really busy and then someone decides to make a complaint about an old issue? Well that happened today when a patient decided to complain about her medicine that was given to her yesterday.

I was serving another customer and overheard this lady complaining to my colleague about how she wasn't told or informed or asked that she was given a generic brand.

After I finished serving my customer, I attended to this lady and asked her what was wrong. She said her doctor had written Flagyl 400mg on the prescription but was given Metrogyl 400mg by the pharmacist yesterday. She was not told of the change and she was worried so she missed out on one day of treatment. She wants to make a complaint because we didn't consult her.

Now she was speaking quite calmly to me. She did mention how she overhead me and my other colleague giving good counselling just then. But for some reason she didn't receive any yesterday and she's disappointed.

I checked her script and reassured her its the same thing. It is correct. The instructions on there is correct. I also told her maybe it was busy at the time and we may have missed out on passing that information to her or that maybe she didn't remember. I did also reassure her that we do inform each and every patient about these changes. I did apologise on the pharmacy's behalf if that did happened but that there could be some misunderstanding we don't remember.

Anyway, after my reassurance and apology, she said she still wanted to make a complaint. I did ask her, "is there anything else I can help you with today?" and "what would you like me to do?" but all she said was she's 'well aware that its the same thing and thank me for the time to explain to her' but she still insisted in making a complaint.

Hmmm now I'm an expert at complaints. I make complaints at restaurants, clothing store, everywhere I go where I'm not happy with the quality of the product or service. Now with all complaints, rule of thumb is, you need to go in and ask yourself 'what do you want to achieve as a result of this complaint'. ie. do you want some sort of apology, or compensation, or closing down of shop or give the store a bad rep?

I've apologised to the lady (even though it wasn't my fault but i was the pharmacist on duty then so i had to do it). Compensation - don't expect to get some money from 'bad service - we did supply the correct drug and we didn't kill anyone after all'. Closing down - no that won't happen from a random complaint. Bad rep - depends on where you complain to. If you complain to the media then yes, but if you complain to our manager or boss, outsiders won't know.

So my question is, what did she want to achieve as a result of a complaint?