It could seem counterintuitive that any school would want to encourage parents, students and staff to lodge a complaint.

For one, school staff  have enough on their plate. So the idea of actively encouraging complaints, and then going through the process of responding to them, could just look like creating another unnecessary headache.

But there are several reasons why all schools across Australia should review their current complaints handling processes.

First of all, schools are have several legal obligations (both state and Federal) to have a complaints handling process in place including registration guidelines in most states and territories, the National Code relating to international students, the Early Education National Quality Framework and the legislative framework regulating Registered Training Organisations.

These obligations will become even more pressing when the new Privacy Laws come into force on March 12, 2014.

Under the new Privacy Laws, schools will be required to show that they have practices, systems and procedures in place for handling privacy inquiries or complaints (in relation to how they handle personal or sensitive information).

But rather than just ensuring you are complying with the law, there are strong commercial reasons why it makes sense for schools to have a well-articulated complaints handling processes in place.

There is an old adage that an unhappy customer will, on average, tell ten people about their bad experience. These ten people will then each tell a further five people and so on. For every formal complaint a business actually receives, there are supposedly nine other customers who never complain directly but still tell ten people about their bad experience. If this is true basic maths tells us that for every formal complaint a business receives, no less than 500 people will have heard about other customer’s bad experience.

The bad news, for organisations that have not developed formal systems for handling complaints, is that these figures, as frightening as they are, are based on research undertaken in 1999, which was more or less before the internet really started to get going. In those days email was in its infancy, there was no Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, and certainly not the depth of online discussion forums that dominate the net these days.

Now with the growth of social media when someone wants to complain about your school they have the world’s biggest megaphone at their fingertips. While positive news often travels slowly, negative comments about your school will travel faster than the speed of light. One negative experience broadcast over the internet megaphone has the power to severely damage your school’s reputation and undo years of hard work.

One of the reasons that is often cited by schools for not effectively managing complaints is that they would be overrun with complaints from pushy Type A parents and they can’t avoid to allocate resources to this process.  Unfortunately this amounts to letting pushy Type A parents control the agenda whilst the legitimate feedback of other parents that really does reflect on your schools standards of services is not captured effectively.

The irony is that a properly designed complaints system will enable you to identify and effectively manage vexatious complainants. This was illustrated in a school recently where the heads of Junior, Middle and Senior school only became aware by chance conversation that they were all receiving volumes of complaints from the same parent (with three children at the school, all in different years). On further (co-ordinated) investigation the source of the parent’s issues were trace back to a recent separation and managed with appropriate sensitively. Any way you look at it, not properly managing complaints is going to cost your school dearly. All schools get complaints. Some of them are legitimate and reflect your standard of service, others are vexatious. The key is to capture them and manage them effectively before they get out of control.

Creating an effective Complaints Handling program

Setting up an internal system for capturing and effectively managing complaints can be a challenge. Luckily, however, you will not be the first organisation in the world that has come across this challenge.

There is in fact an International Standard for Complaints Handling and Dispute Resolution (AS ISO 10002) which provides a very useful blueprint for developing your defences against the risk of negative feedback going viral. There are also useful frameworks developed by ombudsman in each State and Territory.