The Union Internationale des Avocats held its 24th World Forum of Mediation Centres in Singapore on October 13-14. In addition to the usual high level of discourse and the unparalleled opportunity to meet new friends and keep the old, this particular Forum offered the additional opportunity to reassess the extraordinary richness of Singapore as a world center for international commerce and commercial dispute resolution.
The impact is that the key battleground for customer loyalty is now complaints. If consumers at best are happy to self-manage and at worst are discouraged from contacting, then when a real issue arises, it becomes the only point after purchase that a customer really has to engage with a business.
I’ve been doing appellate mediation since the program began, and I’ve been genuinely surprised by the success rate. At the program’s inception, I anticipated a significantly lower success rate than I’ve had with non-appellate mediations — but it’s about 70%, which isn’t much lower than my rate for other matters.
We value our relationships, and in the back of our minds the thought of reciprocity may be bouncing around (“Maybe I’ll have to ask this person for something in the future…”) but we can’t please everyone all the time.
Tim Pownall on behalf of the PACIS project in faith-based diplomacy accepted the 2011 Peacemaker Award given each year by the Association for Conflict Resolution. The Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) is an organization committed to awareness of conflict resolution in the public.
