met wrote:

I work for a FTSE 20 company and can assure you that emailing the CEO does absolutely work!!

I know that it works as I have used it myself . Ususally it's because a\ the customer has a valid complaint and has been genuinely failed by the process thus far....b\ the customer is a pain in the and won't accept the outcome thus far....c\ the customer has a 'do you know who I am' type inflated ego and feels the need to sidestep the process as it is beneath them.

I have always worked from the point of view of empowering staff to assess and deal with complaints at source within a defined policy structure so it should rarely need to be escalated to the very top. Any complaint will claim to have a mitigating circumstance but the assessment of that should and can be built into the scope of the policy. Always back your staff up publicly and if anything new can be learned from the incident handling then adapt the policy after. I can't count on my fingers how many complaints reach my desk over the last 15 years ...by contrast I can count on the numerous letters, e-mails and telephone calls telling me how well my staff dealt with a problem at the time.

I accept that the MD, FD has to judge each complaint that does get to him on the basis of the greater good ...but if it happens too frequently for the wrong reasons then they need to ask some fundamental questions of why and why these things aren't being dealt with at an earlier stage, which given the amount of poor feedback on this site about LRCS, is my overriding point.