Complaining to a big pharmacy company

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Business lesson: Complaining to a big pharmacy company

Teacher: Kori Blaisdale

Students: Mary, Sumera, Michael, Anatoly, Tracy, Sergey, Loius, Megi (Europe, Asia)

Have you ever participated in a medical trial? I haven’t. I cannot even imagine doing that. But some people do it, usually for money. That’s what we discussed during this lesson. I can say that most of us agreed on the fact that it could be quite dangerous to take a part in medical trials. It could affect one’s health quite radically. I remember few cases where people actually died after being a part in trials in 2006 in the UK.

Of course in EC nothing like this can happen and we just discussed the topic further. Later in the lesson Kori gave us a notecard with a situation which we role-played.

You were in a trail study for a pill that is supposed to make you more intelligent. You agreed to it knowing the side effects were mild.

I think this pill could come quite handy (be useful) one day.

However when you did the study the side effects were severe and had a detrimental effect on your life.

Now you want to complain to the pharmaceutical company that caused you some problems.

We were divided into pairs and each pair was to discuss this and try to replay the situation. One of the pair was a customer, who complained and the second one was a representative of a pharmaceutical company. The task was not to let the customer get much far with the complaint. That was quite difficult because the clients were very firm and very annoyed.

Here are some phrases they used to make their point stronger when they complained.

Look, this is absolutely ridiculous!

You have an obligation to me as a customer.

I can't believe you think this is acceptable.

Would you (eat/try/do/drink/ accept) this?

I'm flabbergasted that you think this is reasonable!

you're being unreasonable.

This is simply unacceptable.

You can't be serious!?!

I demand you do something about this.

How dare you speak to me like that!

Have you not heard of 'the customer is always right?'

You haven’t got the right to treat me like this.

I want to speak to your manager.

I want to know what you're going to do about this!

If you don't resolve this, I'm going to take it to the press/ombudsman