Complaints are actually business ideas

we have become accustomed to cries about poor customer care relations in this country. There have been many initiatives to address the problems and all the people that matter, including the President, have talked about it to no avail. The people on the receiving end of such complaints often fall back to that boring rhetoric of ‘stop complaining without offering solutions.’ Of course they are right, sometimes these problems persist because one is not aware of a better way of doing things.However, while you offer solutions for each of your complaints, when it comes to a service or product you may not realise that you are actually throwing away wonderful business ideas. What you find wrong can actually be the hallmark of a whole new business.Look at how Google built its business empire. They saw what was wrong with search engines of the day like Yahoo and Ask Jeeves, then went and built something that addressed those loopholes.In the early 2000s, when many people were using Yahoo, you would lose all the text of the your email you were typing if there was a power outage. I actually used to prefer typing my emails in MS Word, where I could regularly save them before pasting them onto the Yahoo mail page.Google saw that problem and when it launched Gmail, your email could be auto saved on their servers as you typed. That way, when the power went off abruptly, you would still find your text in the drafts. By the time Yahoo adopted this new change, many people had already crossed over to Gmail.The other day, I heard someone complaining about a private hospital that does not have an option of setting appointments with the doctor. The person was bothered by the fact that with her busy schedule, she still had to wait in a long queue, yet she would be willing to pay more money to be attended to faster.So many businesses and business ideas are actually born out these complaints that we make endlessly. Many restaurants are known for the delay one has to endure before being attended to, yet other new places assure you of service in less than 10 minutes. I even know of a place, where, if you are not served in 15 minutes, you get a free meal. All the technological innovations the world has seen are born from the desire to correct problems. Necessity is the mother of invention, we are often told, and this indeed is no lie. The difference here is that some of us simply complain.On the other hand, smart people may complain silently, but with a smirk on their face. They have suddenly realised that the problem they are facing is actually a cue to their next big idea that will see them smile all the way to the bank. It is your choice as to which group you prefer to belong to.