Customer Response #5507412A

Dear Kate,

Thank you for your recent letter to Wayne R. Sanders, about KLEENEX® COTTONELLE® UltraSoft bathroom tissue. We appreciate the opportunity to respond.

Although the majority of consumers who tested the improved product preferred it to the previous style, we can understand that everyone may not agree. As a loyal consumer, your opinion is important to us, and you can be confident that we will share your comments with our bathroom tissue team.

In hopes that you will continue to use Kimberly-Clark products, we are sending you some cost-saving coupons through the mail. Thanks again for contacting us and for giving us an opportunity to respond. We value you as a customer.

LouAnn
Consumer Services
Kimberly-Clark Corp.

Confidential to funky49: You are so very right about the above letter. I thought my well-crafted original letter would make them reconsider their fool-hardy decision to change their excellent product to a substandard one. I was oh-so-very wrong of course and I wish you had been there to advise me of my folly before the letter had been written, sealed and posted. Lucky for the Kimberly-Clark Corporation, they added aloe to the new Cottonelle and all is forgiven. Should I write and tell them? Please let me know! Your pal, facty

This customer response by a corporation is a good one. It is receiver-focused which is better received then if the focus is on the company in question. LouAnn actually addresses it to "Kate" instead of "customer #550,741.2A". The letter also thanks the customer for informing the company. It puts forward the idea that the customer may still be right even though the new product does not appeal to them as much as the old version. This shows empathy to the customer. The response letter labels "Kate" a loyal customer with hopes she will stay loyal to their brand. This letter also says that the customer's voice is being heard by the 'bathroom tissue team’. This was probably the intent of the complaint letter in the first place. The company also does well by sending the customer coupons as an incentive to try their product again and potentially stay a customer.

This node was created as a mockery to the large corporation response to a customer. Clearly every part of this letter was crafted to make the customer feel better. It does everything my Business Communications book says to do in response to a customer complaint.

What kind of response was factgirl looking for exactly? Did she honestly expect the Kimberly-Clark Corp to say "Oops, we're going to change our product back because of your letter! We're also going to give our Marketing department a strict talking to!"? No, this was the best kind of response that she could have expected. If you don't like a product, complain about it and find a better one.