If your bins haven't been collected this week, I'm going to guess you'll probably be marginally peeved. You'll probably contact the council to tell them - maybe whilst you're still marginally peeved.
But when you're contacting the council to tell them about your fear of a forthcoming surplus in your personal waste department, what are you doing - are you complaining about your bins not having been collected, or are you reporting that your bins haven't been collected?
Many councils are very clear about this - if it's just one instance of your bins not having been collected, then it's a report, not a complaint. It should only be a complaint if you're peeved because your bins are repeatedly not being collected.
Should you decide to complain about your bins not being collected, ie should you fill in the general complaints form rather than the specific service report form, then many councils' Customer Services departments - which usually receive and process complaints - will feel moderately peeved that you complained about something you 'should' have instead reported. They'll be partly peeved because, well, it's just wrong, innit, they'll partly be peeved because their staff will be tasked with dealing with it rather than it having gone straight to the rubbish department to deal with, and they'll be partly peeved because in the quarterly reports to Cabinet, all the stern words by important councillors will be about how bad Customer Services is for receiving all these complaints rather than how bad Waste Services is for not collecting the bins, which will then be translated into an article in the local paper about 'the council's failing customer services department'.
Some councils will be better at presenting this dichotomy of complaint vs report to you, the user, better than others. If you're unlucky, you'll live somewhere where the council will close your complaint as unjustified and tell you to report the missed collection instead. Some might close it as partially justified (which is often code for 'we think it's unjustified but we don't want to wind you up further') and manually copy and paste the information into the missed bin collection report form at their end. Some will indeed take the hit and pass the report on, and leave it open until your bins have been collected and then close it as justified, but still gnash their teeth whilst they do it.
Council websites currently considered to be good, when you land on the main contact us page or the main complaints page, will try to signpost you in the direction of the appropriate service report form, using the gentlest language they can muster. If you're marginally peeved about the service delivery failure, this might get you even more peeved.
Thing is, though, why should you even care about whether you should be using the complaints form or the service report form? Even if you've been successfully signposted, that's still a glitch in your user journey - you followed the user journey you assumed to be correct, and since form your perspective the complaints form is a perfectly valid form to complete, you should be accepted for continuing to complete that form, and the underlying system should be taking care of the technicalities.
But actually, why should the council even care either? The management information people will no doubt express all manner of perfectly reasonable-sounding explanations as to why it matters why something should be logged as a report rather than a complaint, but really, why does it really matter? At the end of the day, we have failed to deliver the service the citizens have the right to receive, and the citizen is letting us know we've failed. I've not done an extensive piece of user research on this, but I feel confident in expressing a prediction that a significant majority of people who if they're taking the time out of their own busy days to tell us about that pothole, or that broken traffic light, or that missed bins collection, then there will be varying levels of peevedness in their mind about it. I don't know about you, but I don't think I know anybody who would be thinking kind thoughts about the council when they got home to find the overflowing bin still there.
So what actually is a complaint?
When it boils down to it, a 'complaint' is a report from a disgruntled user about a failure to properly deliver a service. Whether or not they're using the words 'I would like to make a complaint', we should take that failure and their likely or expressed feelings about it seriously. We should not tell them that it's not a valid complaint just because it's the first time they've reported that pothole, and we should take the same steps to resolve the service failure regardless of whether they're telling us how annoyed they are.
And we absolutely should not be telling them to use one form to report the missed bins collection and a different form in an entirely different part of the site to complain about the missed bins collection.
My solution
So for the BigTown Council missed bins report form, I've incorporated the complaint escalation into the actual form - the user who comes home to find their full bin still there who is the understanding sort of person who knows we've had to make cutbacks so we don't have easily available cover in the case of staff sickness, they'll just make the report.
But if the citizen is proper narked about it - whether it's the first time it's ever happened to them or the 10th time this year - they get the option to have their report logged as a complaint as well at the same time, with an additional box appearing to enable them to express their frustration in the terms they wish, without having to also duplicate the core information that it's a missed bin collection and when it should have been collected, thus avoiding riling them up even more.