Stranded alone in an airport in North Carolina, Lucia Davies* was frustrated. In the middle of a backpacking holiday, her £676 Delta Air Lines flight home had been cancelled due to bad weather and she was grounded for two days. She was, she says, given no help finding a place to stay by Delta airline staff and no compensation for the £210 of expenses she incurred.

This was perfectly legal because the delay was not the airline’s fault, but that didn’t put Davies off complaining when she got home – and not just to customer services. She spent half an hour researching the names of Delta’s directors, then looked up their professional responsibilities on LinkedIn in order to aim her ire more directly.

“One director was the head of customer service,” she said. “I wrote her a very long email, focusing not on the cause of the delay but on the fact that Delta employees at the airport had a duty of care and responsibility towards me – and they didn’t fulfil it.”

While she couldn’t find this director’s email address, she guessed it would follow the format of firstname.lastname@Delta.com or something similar. “I tried a few combinations, and one got through to her. That same day she called me personally. She gave me £400 in cash, £900 in flight vouchers, 45,000 air miles and made me a Gold Member, so it’s likely I’ll be upgraded on future flights.”

Two weeks later, Delta’s complaints department responded to the same email she had sent the head of customer service, stating that it was against the airline’s policy to issue refunds due to poor weather, and offering her a £37 voucher.

Davies is not alone in taking the direct approach. CEOemail.com, a free UK-based website, says the volume of people searching for CEO email addresses has increased dramatically recently. It gathers and publishes the work email addresses, Twitter handles, office phone numbers and postal addresses of chief executives, company directors and senior staff at organisations all over the world. The site saw a 10% increase in traffic over the summer and is visited by more than 11,000 people every day.

“Even MPs use the email addresses we publish to complain on behalf of their constituents,” said editor and founder Marcus Williamson.

CEOs at telecoms and energy companies are usually the worst at answering emails from their customers, while retailers – particularly supermarkets – tend to be the most responsive. He added: “The CEOs of Metro Bank, BT, Thomas Cook and easyJet will also often respond personally to emails.”

Even when a CEO doesn’t respond personally, the complaint will still get dealt with better Blogger Helen Dewdney

The Observer put this to the test, sending an email to the chief executives at these companies and asking them to respond directly. Of those who did, Metro Bank’s Craig Donaldson was the quickest, replying in just five minutes. “If a customer takes the time to write to me, I should take the time to read it, resolve any issues and learn from it,” he said.

Carolyn McCall, CEO of easyJet, took less than 90 minutes to reply personally. “When we get it wrong, I want our customers to know we’re trying very hard to get it right.” She gets around 500 emails a day. “I’ll scan all of them, make a phone call or reply to some, and funnel them to my executive team. I’m particularly interested in when there are multiple things we haven’t got right or something has been mishandled. I want to know why, so we can improve.”

Peter Fankhauser, CEO of Thomas Cook Group, replied while en-route to China with a very cheerful message (complete with smiling emoticon) after two-and-a-half hours, and BT followed shortly afterwards.

“I respond personally to customers for two reasons,” says BT CEO Gavin Patterson. “Firstly, because I want to set the right tone – customers pay our salaries and dividends, and without them, we haven’t got a business. As CEO you can say that, but unless you act on it people don’t believe you. Second, customer emails are also a source of insight into what’s going on in the business. I’ll spot trends I haven’t necessarily been told about or other people haven’t noticed.

“It’s very easy for people in senior positions to become detached. In as many cases as I can, I’ll personally reply, acknowledging the complaint and forwarding it to the right person to ensure it gets fixed. You have to have a tough skin – I treat aggressive, swearing emails no differently. If there’s a problem, we’ll aim to fix it as fast as we possibly can.”

Of the 10 most-searched CEOs on CEOemail.com, the heads of Asda, Boohoo.com, Sainsburys and BT all replied within four hours. There was no answer from Tesco, British Airways or Virgin Media, while a generic response came back from Virgin’s Richard Branson. TalkTalk’s Dido Harding and a member of Vodafone’s “specialist customer relations team” forwarded the email to the press office.

In another instance, Nathan Rous, who works in PR, became frustrated after the customer service department of car hire firm Dollar Hire Cars refused to refund him $700 for a faulty satnav.He searched corporate press releases and news articles to find the names and email addresses of the company’s vice-presidents and board members, including the CEO. A few days after he emailed a 400-word complaint to each of them, he was offered a full refund by customer services. “No quibbling, clearly it came from the top down,” he said.

Such is the number of consumers escalating their complaints to CEOs that most large companies have set up “executive teams” which deal with complaints sent directly to the CEO and other senior staff, said Williamson. These teams are the same ones called on by the press office to try to resolve complaints that threaten to go public, and wield much more power than a normal customer service department. They can offer refunds and change delivery times when customer services cannot. They can get in touch with the billing department and other parts of the business which customer service has no idea how to reach. They have the power to investigate and retrain staff, and can recompense you for the time you have spent dealing with a problem, he said.

But what if you demand a personal response from the CEO and not another complaints handler, “executive team” or not? Ingrid Stone, author of Letters of a Dissatisfied Woman, recommends posting a letter marked “personal and confidential” to the CEO or emailing outside working hours, when a PA is less likely to be monitoring emails.

Helen Dewdney, Complaining Cow blogger and author of the consumer guide How to Complain, has definitely noticed a decrease in the number of personal replies she gets from CEOs as executive teams take over.

“There’s a risk of CEOs becoming more removed from complaints as a result,” she said. “But in my experience, even when a CEO doesn’t respond personally, the complaint will still get dealt with better than if you try other routes.”

If users of CEOemail.com report that a CEO has been totally unresponsive or is not on the site, Williamson will take up the complaint on their behalf, contacting both the CEO and the press office. “I find the responsiveness of the chief executive tends to reflect the responsiveness of the company overall,” he said. “It’s like a barometer – the less responsive the chief exec, the lower the overall customer satisfaction in a company.”

*Not her real name.

No insults or capital letters



■ “Unless your complaint is very serious, exhaust the customer service complaints procedure first, before emailing the CEO,” says Helen Dewdney, author of the Complaining Cow blog. “Otherwise, it’s very likely you’ll be dropped back down to customer services.”

■ “Focus on just the CEO or one director,” says Marcus Williamson, editor of CEOemail.com. “Emailing several directors at the same time dilutes the impact of your email and creates confusion. But do copy in the person you’ve been dealing with in customer services. The effect is like putting a rocket underneath them.”

■ “Keep it as short you can,” says BT CEO Gavin Patterson. “Give your details, including your phone number and account number, and a short summary of why we’ve failed. You don’t need to write several pages or make threats - we don’t prioritise on that basis.”

■ “Criticise the customer service team in a factual and concise way - don’t write insults,” says Dewdney. “List all the things that have happened and emphasise the continued poor service and lack of resolution. Say you are bringing the matter to the CEO’s attention in the hope that he or she can investigate, and put better processes and procedures in place. Stress the company has lost you as a customer as things stand.”

■“Be clear about what you want,” says complaints experts Ingrid Stone, author of Letters of a Dissatisfied Woman. “If you want a refund, say so.”

■“Keep your feelings out of it,” says Christine James, founder of American complaints website Hissingkitty.com. “The moment you bring in emotional language or threats you will lose credibility.”

■ “Never write anything in capitals - it’s the equivalent of shouting,” says Dewdney. “Use bold and italics instead.”