My Sim is running a Best Buy and he as well the employees are constantly complained at by the customers for an unknown reason. I even tried to calm down one of them by showing the Wii that's on stock but he rejected. Why are the customers complaining at the owner (and the employees) and how to prevent complaining customers or lower the chance?

No complaining http://www.insimenator.org/index.php/topic,7026.0.html

The most common causes for customer complaints are messes. These include dirty bathrooms, dishes attracting flies in the employee break area that they can't even access, and piles of bags thrown to the floor by people who got sick of waiting for the cashier.

If you can't find the mess, I suggest going into buy mode and looking at the lot in plan view. If you still can't find it, check your trees - you may have a stuck fire (especially if you've used the breadfruit tree and don't have the fix).

They will even complain about an empty plate left just seconds ago.

Yeah, as always, the Maxoids had a great idea, and then completely botched it.

Sure, I agree, it's a bit too easy to just put in a mod to completely ban complaints. But everysim and his long-deceased 3rd-great-grand-uncle twice removed complaining to the restaurant manager about a stinky plate that they just left *themselves* ??? Come on! That just BEGS to be completely disabled! So, while I'm not proud of it, I long ago found a simple way to completely bypass the complaints system in business lots.

If you don't want to ban complaining completely, cyjon's Less Complaining could help. Customers will still complain, but they ignore some things. For dishes, they will only complain once the plates that have flies (so no more eating the food then complaining about their own plate right away).

Ah, but Rule 1 : the client is always right; and Rule 2: If the client is wrong, please refer to Rule 1.
Clean up. Make the client feel happy

No thanks, without that mod you can't even have guests over at a home business for a party of any kind because instead of having nice interaction your sim will be running around to grab guests chip packets and trying to doge the complaints that will ruin your party. If you enjoy that, more power to you. I would rather my sim sat and had a chat.

The solution, for me, before being introduced to mods, was to have enough Sims at home so that one can clean up. So I still open the business when all Sims are home, and get one of them to do the cleaning while the others are attending to the clients. Then close the business when there is a party. I do believe a mod is easier, but I also learned for many years how to play around problems, and have been used to do so for so long - so I still do that.

I like playing happy Sims, and I've seen my business owners in tears over complaints. Unreasonable customers are a fact of real business life, but I think I'll give Cyjon's mod a try.

My business was shut when I had people over and they still complained. I'm with BO, decent idea, but the execution of it was terrible and unrealistic. I don't mind a challenge but that was just a chore. Like Andrew I also dislike seeing best friends act furious and lose relationship points from a chip packet.

You have a good point, both of you Mending relationships is something one deals with a lot in a vanilla game, of course, and kind of a challenge too. At this stage I am coping without mods for complaining; perhaps later on I may decide to use it. Personally - and perhaps due to playing vanilla for so long - the game gets a bit boring if all potential conflicts are modded out - but it is just my way of playing. I like a bit of drama in my game!

I never have a problem with complaints at an ordinary business; it has only ever been a problem trying to play the delaRosas in the GS Uberhood. The complaints can be crossed out of the queue during the party or visit, and no harm done, but after spending little Flossie's birthday party stomping complaints from guests who never behave that way at each other's houses, I just sold the business. I'm gearing up for the endgame of the challenge in Bluewater, and will be playing the neighborhood properly at last, so will be able to run businesses properly and they'll be able to use all that extra space. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to run a home business without it being mostly a pain in the butt (having to lock and unlock the doors to let guests in and keep customers from wandering around the backyard is another not-fun thing), but this is not the time or place.

Nope. You surely can. I have no mods for complaining sims for business, and can manage totaly. Playing is also being organised..mods sure help, but I am not going to let them do everything for me.

I dunno. I tried a home business and had a party at it. Had the same issues as some others, with the guests complaining about the plates almost immediately after they stood up from eating. This is especially annoying if the guests finish first. I had host family members literally get queue-pushed from their own eating just so the guest could complain. They even got stopped while they were cleaning up! It was so annoying, I didn't try it again without a mod on hand to curb it.

This is one of several reasons why I never run home businesses in my game. I like the idea of home businesses, but I think the way they're implemented in the game is poor, even with mods. When I run Bluewater Village, I always have Florence Delarosa close her home-based florist shop and buy the Just Flowers and More lot for her business.

That was exactly what was happening. If other people find that fun so be it, but I certainly don't. It has nothing to do with management, I can manage just fine-when I want to, but having guests over for dinner who queue stomp you all the time to complain is not something I want to manage. Is that how your friends act when they come to dinner? No.

Some of the folks here would disagree. :P

Yes, they might However, where I live, it is the norm and you will find these two rules displayed in many businesses.

So even if they are very wrong they would leave shops in your area with whatever it was they wanted and nobody would try and put them straight? I get the sentiment but as a small business owner I can't agree. Customers unless they fully understand do not always know what they need at all.

In real life, clients seldom complain if they do not have a problem (I own a small business myself) - the biggest businessman in this province has those two rules prominently displayed in all his shops, and perhaps due to his outrageous success, many others have followed the example. He is also one of the richest men in the country. Going out of your way to keep clients happy will keep them loyal.

Maybe it depends what service you are supplying or what you are selling. Customers won't be happy if they bought the wrong thing. He must be in the right line, no chance of us getting rich here in the country.

He owns several big stores, selling furniture, appliances, electronics, etc - and these days most of the buildings in the town. He started way back with a very small shop; these days he has several of them around the province. I once bought a dishwasher from him and noticed some tiny scratches - and it bothered me, since it was new, and he came to pick it up and bring another one on the same day. His staff is really well trained. He is an Indian man and I got to know him rather well when I worked at a local election at the Muslim hall one year (after the dishwasher) - he kept bringing us food and soft drinks. Guess I am derailing here Yet I have learned a lot from him about many things.

I think people on both ends misunderstand the "customer is always right" concept. Having received some appallingly bad customer service in my time, and having had to supply customer service myself, I have found that the important thing is that the customer feel that the individual person she's dealing with is on her side. Listening sympathetically, asking intelligent questions (especially when it's apparent that the customer doesn't have the knowledge base to phrase the problem correctly), and above all acknowledging that there is a problem to be solved work wonders. I've had to deal with far too many people who should be doing customer service who are instead trying to protect the company and/or themselves from actually having to exert themselves to provide a service. It's terrible, but I've found that the only way to progress with such people is to get volubly angry and make it clear to them that they are not paid enough to deal with me, so that I get passed up the chain of command to someone who either cares about solving the problem, or has no one to pass me to and can't get out of it.

I hate being good at this skill, but I have been forced into cultivating it. And I've reaped the consequences of a generally poor level of customer service in society while I've been at jobs, taking a lot of phone calls which start off hostile on the assumption that it will save time to get to the pass-this-bozo-up-the-foodchain stage right away. So I adopted the policy of putting on my very best sweet-little-lady voice and responding to complaints of any type with: "That's not good! Let's see what I can do for you!" And as soon as I acknowledged that the problem existed, the customer would relax and all hostility evaporated. In one job in particular there might not be anything directly I could do to solve it, there being people at the company who either didn't understand how to transfer a call, or transferred troublesome customers randomly, so that I'd be getting billing questions at my admin desk in engineering; and in that case I'd tell them frankly that this was not something I was qualified to deal with myself, but that if they'd give me their phone number I'd find the individual who could and call them right back with the information. Since I knew more about the company than they did, it would usually be a matter of a few minutes at most to track down the right department and the responsible party within it, so I would leave that person a message and then call the customer back with the number, the name, and pertinent information like when their optimal time to call was, so that at least next time they wouldn't get lost at the switchboard. In smaller companies where I was familiar with a larger proportion of the work done, I might be able to solve the problem myself, or at least reduce it to manageable proportions, just by clearing up a misunderstanding over jargon that nobody else had realized was jargon. And even in the case of customers who were 100% responsible for their own problems, taking the position that if the customer had a problem we had one, too (and we did - we had an unhappy customer) always defused the situation; whereas taking the position that all customers are stupid and that the company is innocent until proven guilty always escalated it.

And that's what the motto means: If the customer says there's a problem, there's a problem, and solving it is the priority, regardless of who created it.

I've never had a problem with customers complaining in sims, except at the single home business I've tried to run, the Delarosa place; and in that case the problem was a) that the lot is poorly designed (all those shrubs - even the gardener can't keep up with them! And too many access points needing locking and unlocking to keep customers out of the private areas.) and b) that anyone who doesn't live there is defined as a "customer" whether the business is open or not. If the business is closed, then non-residents should be redefined as "guests" and not have to deal with any coding forcing them to behave like customers.

Emphasizing with a customer is a very good tactic. That business is way larger than us. Country town-country shop, mostly just my husband there. He's a locksmith and saving damsels in distress and little old men is his specialty. Along with the drunks or those turfed out with cops in tow. Totally off topic but my husbands key that he cut for a 'House Rules' show got shown on TV. That's about as glamorous as we have gone around here in the sticks.

My issue with the game is only really at home businesses. It drove me nuts trying to give them any kind of social life that invloved guests at the house, so I modded it out. I've never tried Cyjon's version, might be worth taking a look at.