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When you've purchased a particularly poor product or had a poor customer service experience, there's no better way to channel your frustration than to write the perfect complaint letter to the company that disappointed you. In this post, I'll give six strategies to help you write an effective complaint letter.

1) Do it NOW
Tackle the complaint letter immediately to make the most efficient use of your time. The details will be fresh in your mind and the receipts and paperwork will be right there in front of you. Even your irritation and annoyance from the poor product or service will be fresh in your mind, and that makes it all the easier to channel that negative energy into the letter. If you wait a few days, the details will fade from memory, the emotional immediacy will no longer there waiting to be channeled, and as a result it will take you much longer to hammer out the letter.

Furthermore, a timely complaint letter also helps the company you're complaining to. Timeliness is particularly critical if the company is experiencing problems with mass-produced products where a production problem can quickly grow out of control and affect thousands, if not millions, of items. If your complaint gets to them in a timely manner, you'll be alerting them in time for them perhaps to do something about it before it cascades out of control. Of course, if they choose to ignore you, that's their own fault.

2) Start off by killing 'em with kindness
I typically open a complaint letter with a sentence or two about how dedicated a customer I am. I typically don't have to stretch the truth to say this-if I weren't a dedicated customer, I wouldn't bother to write the letter in the first place. I'd just vote with my feet and change brands. Companies know that it's worth their time and effort to keep dedicated customers happy.

3) Be concise and keep it simple
Keep your letter as simple and brief as possible and only stick to the facts. Use simple sentence structure. As obvious as this advice may sound, you'd be surprised how rarely it gets followed-in any form of writing. You can save the tortured metaphors and multiple clauses for another time. You're trying to get a refund, not write a novel! If you can't state your problem in a couple of brief paragraphs (or even in a couple of brief sentences), you're over-thinking things and wasting your time.

4) Include the purchase date, package code and any other identifying codes, and include a copy of your receipt
Believe it or not, many companies

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