Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images
Most organizations treat customer complaints as a source of frustration to be contained, apologized for, and moved off the books as swiftly as possible. But what if those complaints are actually a practical source of innovation? In other words, what about treating complaints as an early-warning system and a free R&D lab?
This approach has been in place at the Vaud University Hospital (CHUV) in Switzerland for over a decade. Rather than sidelining grievances, leaders analyze them, learn from them, and implement fundamental changes. They don’t downplay criticisms; instead, they use feedback as building blocks for making improvements. This is a model that organizations in other industries could also benefit from implementing.
To complement other quality-surveillance tools, such as customer satisfaction surveys, CHUV leaders began collecting complaints at a mediation center at the hospital. The entire customer experience is reflected in those complaints, which are rigorously filed and coded and have surfaced cross-silo breakdowns and uncertainty along with other issues. They cover aspects of customers’ personal experiences (and those of employees as well) but are likely to reflect difficulties that hundreds of other people are at risk of encountering.
Take, for example, the CHUV patient whose testimony led to the correction of a malfunction in the cancellation and rescheduling of surgical appointments. The customer had been discharged from the hospital after an operation and erroneously received a call the next day informing him that he was going to have surgery the following week. This call caused excessive and preventable anxiety because of the questions it raised for the patient: Did the doctors operate on the wrong person? Do I have a complication? This account led the department involved to review its entire process for scheduling surgical appointments and to install clear verification checkpoints to prevent other patients from experiencing the same miscommunication.
Over a 29-month period from 2021 to 2024, CHUV developed 17 projects based on testimonials from patients, relatives, and professionals. Projects ranged from reducing wait times for elderly patients to improving the information-sharing process for families experiencing a tragic event.
Those examples highlight a simple truth: When complaints are treated as data, not disruptions, organizations can respond more quickly, learn more, and improve their services. Concretely, this reframes “quality” from a metric that just measures outcomes to one that takes into account reliability and trust.
Beyond Clinical Excellence: Learning From Hospitality
Identifying problems is only half the battle. Solving them requires new skills and, in many cases, a new mindset. For CHUV, that meant partnering with the EHL Hospitality Business School, also in Lausanne, to develop a cross-industry training program beginning in 2021. The goal was to equip health care professionals with the service expertise that the hospitality sector has been honing for decades. The program focuses on service design, social skills, and patient experience — all skills that would benefit from being further developed in traditional clinical curricula.
The logic is simple. Although patients evaluate the quality of their care based partly on clinical outcomes, their perceptions are also shaped by their service experience — how they are welcomed, informed, and supported. In competitive health markets, these “nontechnical” moments can tip the balance between loyalty and attrition. Most clinical training programs partially touch on these interactions, but such skills are no longer nice-to-haves. They are a strategic differentiator.
The program was codesigned by a hospitality management specialist from EHL (Lohyd Terrier) and a public health professional from CHUV (Béatrice Schaad Noble). Its primary objective was to apply EHL’s expertise in hospitality to the hospital’s operational requirements to help preserve the institution’s capacity for hospitality amid the growing technologization of medicine and the tendency for digitalization to progressively turn patients into data.
By sending staff members from departments exposed to external competition, such as elective surgery or maternity care, to short, hospitality-focused courses, CHUV hoped to strengthen its competitive advantage by giving employees time to develop ways to enhance service quality. In a field that has to constantly battle staff burnout and talent shortages, equipping employees with tools to improve the patient experience had the potential to enhance their own experience and well-being as well.
One of the most revealing examples of this approach emerged when staff members in the training program critically examined the old adage “no news is good news,” a common but problematic mantra in clinical environments. For clinicians, not calling patients whose lab results were normal seemed efficient — a way to avoid unnecessary calls and paperwork — yet it also created a sense of discomfort for patients, given the uncertainty the silence could generate. Indeed, from the patient’s perspective, silence bred anxiety: Was something wrong? Was their file lost? How long should they wait before picking up the phone to ask?
Through joint workshops, clinical and administrative teams codesigned a new process that allows patients to indicate how and when they would prefer to receive test results. Those who prefer email notifications receive timely updates electronically. Those who prefer face-to-face discussions continue to schedule appointments with their physicians. This modest change helped to reduce patient uncertainty and lift the moral burden staff members felt when they weren’t allowed to share the updates patients were asking for. The operational move is simple; the effect on trust is huge.
After just a few days of training, most participants demonstrated a higher level of confidence in their ability to improve the patient experience. That confidence accelerated small tests of changes and wins across units.
An ethos of collaboration started to take hold across services at CHUV. In a dialysis unit grappling with high staff turnover and patient frustration, teams recognized that an unspoken culture or mistaken beliefs about the concept of professionalism penalized professionals for seeking help. Nurses who were having trouble inserting a needle and wanted to pass the task to a colleague worried that they might be judged incompetent — so they self-censored instead of asking for assistance. By reframing the handoff as an act of collaborative care rather than a sign of weakness, staff members reduced tension and improved patient trust.
These are small but profound shifts. They demonstrate how inviting front-line staff members to reimagine service delivery can yield tangible and lasting improvements and eventually reduce conflicts with patients and their relatives. To date, more than 200 professionals have completed the joint program. They have developed more than 20 improvement projects and now report higher job satisfaction, confidence, and motivation.
Three Steps For Using Customer Feedback Better
The collaboration between CHUV and EHL suggests that learning from other industries and listening to customers can re-anchor an organization in empathy and shared purpose. And the stakes for this type of analysis and innovation have never been higher. In the medical field in Switzerland alone, 34% of medical students said they considered leaving the field after their first internship. Burnout, loss of meaning, and relentless administrative pressure are pushing health care professionals out of the field worldwide. But professionals across all industries are feeling a similar weight from burnout.
Here are three steps any organization can take to realize the advantages of customer feedback.
1. Treat complaints as assets, not noise. Stop dismissing grievances as distractions. Integrate the perspectives of customers and professionals in a systematic way. Because they directly experience situations as participants, these actors detect dysfunctions that traditional quality-monitoring tools may overlook. Listen to them through voluntary interviews — for example, in a mediation center or the office of the organization’s chief experience officer — to collect the lived experiences that reveal real needs and expectations. Look for patterns that may indicate cross-department friction — something surveys are unlikely to surface. Link each issue to a process, and prioritize fixes that will have an outsize impact. This approach may require a cultural shift: Criticism or complaints should not be interpreted as signs of individual weakness but as opportunities to identify areas for enhancing quality and even safety.
2. Redesign processes with customers, not for them. Codevelop initiatives based on expressed dissatisfaction. Using oral accounts from customers and professionals to design joint improvement projects creates genuine opportunities for collaboration, so invite customers into solution workshops. Encourage front-line teams to run small experiments, and double down on what works. Make feedback the engine of continuous improvement rather than the end point of a complaint.
3. Borrow expertise from other industries. Work with sectors known for service excellence — such as hospitality — to sharpen service design and communication, and to find better ways to manage uncertainty. Provide teams with short, targeted upskilling sessions that give them practical tools for solving problems creatively. Dedicate time for employee learning and training: Prioritizing teaching and brainstorming can enhance both trust with customers and staff morale.
This process for addressing customer complaints is not about bringing five-star hotel amenities to organizational offerings. Instead, it’s about adopting the mindset that every interaction is an opportunity to build goodwill and reduce uncertainty. When complaints are treated as early warnings rather than irritations, they reveal systemic friction that customers feel but companies often don’t see.
This is a lesson that any organization can apply. Customers’ frustrations are not simply a “cost of doing business.” They are blueprints for building something better. Treat them that way.