Jo Ucukalo

Jo Ucukalo noticed that she was good at handling complaints, and after taking on disputes for friends and family, Handle My Complaint was born.

Describing it as Australia’s first commercial dispute resolution business, Ucukalo says her company has a success rate of more than 70% for 1,500 complaints, which have ranged from problems with the telecommunications industry to the beauty industry, removalists and motor vehicles.

With a background in civil engineering, customer service, the airlines and logistics, Ucukalo says her six-strong team not only take on disputes that a disgruntled consumer doesn’t have the patience or time to address, but helps businesses understand how their processes are perceived from the outside.

With the business just 18 months old, Ucukalo is hoping to increase Handle My Complaint’s revenue to $3 million next year.

Explain your business to us.

Handle My Complaint is essentially a complaint management service where we go through and negotiate between a consumer and a business an amicable arrangement to resolve a complaint.

Generally there’s got to be a complaint for us to resolve. We then go through and understand what the customer wants to achieve and then negotiate with the business and see what outcome we can get for a customer, so that’s basically our core business.

We also assist businesses with their complaint resolution processes as well.

You advise them on how to deal with complaints?

Yes, even with part of our general complaints business we always offer suggestions for improvements as well for that organisation.

I guess it’s a little bit hard when you’re within that organisation to see suggested improvements from the customer’s perspective, so we always try to offer that because we are here to improve the customer experience.

And we’re also here to offer our services to businesses, to sit down and work through their complaints process and assist them in communicating with the customers or what internal processes their business goes through to receive complaints and resolve complaints.

Can you give us an example?

If we see that this is a broad-scale issue, say that the terms and conditions aren’t really clear for consumers, we offer advice to say, “By the way, this is something you may need to look at for your general consumer base, not just for this specific complaint,” even though that’s what we’ve been engaged to do.

Your advice is based on your experiences in dealing with them to resolve that consumer’s complaint?

I guess it’s a combination between having a background in what consumers dislike and also the background of business process improvement or re-engineering.

So it’s a bit of a combination, it is a business process improvement but it’s really from that customer perspective, and I guess that’s where customers really provide that sort of first-hand understanding of what they are perceiving as issues, what sort of issues they are encountering back from the organisation.

That information is really valuable and we put it into a perspective that the business can understand.

A lot of time consumers can get caught up in the emotion of their complaint. You know, they’re angry, they’re frustrated, they’re disappointed.

We can assist the customer first off by taking that emotion and sticking to the facts of what’s happened and then communicating that back to the business.

But at the same time we can speak the business language and say, “Okay, it’s a communication breakdown here, the customer didn’t hear back from you within the expected timeframe therefore that’s something you need to address.”

I guess we have that touch-point of the customer and that touch-point of the business. I guess we’re a sort of a translator between the two.

How old is the business?

The business is approximately 18 months old. It was established by myself when I was resolving my own complaints and getting very good results, just simply going through some sort of methodology – finding the right point to contact, outlining the complaint, asking for a resolution.

So it was something I was doing really well for myself, and then I had friends and family asking for me to advise them, “I’ve got this issue, could you please tell me what I should do”.

I would offer them advice and they would say “it hasn’t worked” or “I can’t be bothered” or “can you just do it for me?”

So then I started doing complaints for my friends and family and then it just started growing, so then they started recommending me to their friends and family and then it just snowballed.

I recognised there was a deficiency in the marketplace that no one is effecting results within the complaints area.

Obviously Government bodies will assist consumers in trying to resolve their complaint but what we do is manage the complaint. So you hand over your complaint to us and we provide that end result by outlining the complaint, doing the follow up, keeping our customers up-to-date with the progress.

We’re taking that burden off them from having to remember, “Oh I’ve got that complaint that’s yet to be resolved and it’s been six weeks and I should follow that up”.

That’s still the case that you’re the only people doing that or have competitors sprung up now?

I’m not aware of anyone else offering the same service.

You said that you’re good at handling complaints and that people might not have the time or patience to follow up their complaints. What else is it that drives your business?

Well, the case managers have got specific information from within the industry as well. For example, we’ve got one case manager that’s worked for the Office of Fair Trading so she’s got a broad range of experience. We’ve also got one case manager who’s worked in the extended warranties sector.

So they’ve got really specific knowledge and been through this process from usually a different perspective from the organisation’s perspective but they know what outcome to expect as well.

That ground knowledge has been a key for the recruitment process, to find that really diverse skill set. And I guess I’m typical of that, I’ve worked in a lot of different industries.

What industries were they?

Well, I started out as a civil engineer and I guess that’s where my business process and good analytical background comes from. But then I’ve worked in customer service, in the airlines, in shipping, in logistics, in warehousing. I think that’s probably it. What makes a good case manager is someone who can think outside of the square, who’s good at resolving problems.