Why does Ajust care about customer complaints?

A (short) bit about me

For a little while, Ajust was just me. So it makes sense to start with who I am. (I promise I’ll keep it short.)

My career started like a pretty conventional lawyer. I worked in blue chip legal roles – I was a corporate lawyer at a top firm and an Associate to a High Court judge (she went on to become the Chief Justice of Australia). I didn’t mind being a lawyer – smart colleagues, high profile projects, nice offices – but I wasn’t ready to commit to a career in corporate law. I decided I was brave enough to try something new, but not brave enough to leave the industry completely.

Thankfully, around the same time, a business called LegalVision was just getting started – with an ambitious mission to transform legal services (a mission it has gone on to achieve in many ways over the last decade).

A (long) apprenticeship in startups

My original job title at LegalVision was “Disputes Lawyer”. But my real aim was to get in the door and learn everything I could about running a startup.

I didn’t last long in the legal team. Soon enough, I was cycling through the business – from partnerships, to customer service, sales, strategy, culture and hiring. I finally landed as Head of Product, where I could combine my legal background with cross-functional impact.

My time at LegalVision stretched longer than the average apprenticeship. The main reason: the business was doing great things. But there was another reason: I hadn’t found an idea I was ready to jump for.

Finding an idea

For me, the right idea needed to hit 3 criteria:

1. A purpose I cared about.
2. An area where I could make a credible impact.
3. A business model that could work.

Consumer complaints ticked all three boxes:

1. Purpose: I’d always believed that the relationships between consumers and businesses were a key ingredient for a successful and fair society. Those relationships are tested most when consumers have bad experiences and make complaints.
2. Credibility: I’d spent the last 5+ years building better ways to solve legal problems with a mix of technology and processes. Complaints weren’t necessarily legal problems, but they had plenty of similarities: two sides (consumer and business), clunky processes (check out the complaints policy for your internet provider) and big volumes (millions of complaints each year in Australia alone).
3. Model: Everyone I spoke to had a consumer war story. There was clearly value to be created and I had conviction that we’d find a way to capture some of it.

(As a side note: the real credit for the idea goes to my partner. But let’s save that story for another time.)

Experimenting to get started

Now that I had an idea, I set up a no frills method to test my most important assumptions: put up a landing page (Squarespace), set up a Google Ads campaign (low budgets), run it for a few weeks, review and repeat. For example, the first cycle tested whether consumers were searching for help with complaints (they were) and the second cycle tested whether consumers would get help from a third party (they would).

A surprising discovery

Early on, I jumped to the conclusion that the biggest problem with complaints was power imbalance – so I should build an “automated consumer advocate”, in the style of DoNotPay, to fight the good fight against big companies.

But my testing revealed a different picture. Here’s what I learnt:

• Most of the time, consumers and businesses genuinely want to resolve complaints in good faith.
• The biggest problem with complaints is not about conflict, it’s about communication.

When things go wrong, most consumers don't need an automated advocate to level the playing field. They just need help to explain what happened in a way that the business can understand. If they can do that, most sensible businesses will act quickly to fix the problem. The best part: fixing the problem is good for the consumer and the business.

Ajust is building a platform that transforms complaints from angry phone rants that go nowhere (conflict / bad communication), to structured data and insights that can be acted on (effective communication).

The vision and the next step

One of the most useful things I’ve heard about running a startup is that you need a clear vision about where you’re going and a solid plan for your next step.

We believe every consumer deserves strong, stable and sustainable relationships with businesses. Our vision reaches beyond complaint resolution. But we can make an impact right now by building a better way to resolve complaints.

So, the next step? Help more and more Australian consumers resolve complaints with their banks, telcos and energy providers.