No matter how great your product or service is, complaints are bound to come up occasionally. Here’s how to manage and learn from customer complaints.

Why should you review and improve your complaints policy?

If you handle customer complaints proactively, you will:

  • Enhance your brand reputation.
  • Boost customer satisfaction, and as a result, customer retention.
  • Be able to identify, and then rectify, key areas of improvement for your business.

Respond to complaints quickly

Be responsive and act quickly to deal with complaints. Keeping customers waiting on hold to talk to someone or waiting several days for an email response could make the situation snowball. Consider outsourcing your contact services if you do not have the internal resources to respond in a timely manner.

Stay calm and acknowledge the issue

Anyone who has worked in customer service knows that it’s particularly frustrating to deal with a customer who is irate, or who is actually… wrong. However, remaining calm with an excellent phone manner will help greatly in de-escalating the situation.

After you have heard the customer out, acknowledge the problem by paraphrasing it back to them so they feel understood. Most importantly, avoid challenging their complaint.

Apologise and offer solutions

Give your customer options for fixing the problem; they may prefer a repair, replacement, refund, further discounts, or simply an apology. Regardless, always apologise, and thank them for bringing the issue to your attention.

Document the complaint

Complaints can present opportunities to learn where your products or services need improvement. If you end up logging multiple complaints about the same issue, you can bring it to the attention of management so the company can fix the problem.

Follow up

A few days later, contact the customer to find out if they were satisfied with how their complaint was handled. Let them know what you are doing to avoid the problem in the future.

If you can’t keep up with your customer service workload, whether you have too many enquiries or complaints for your staff to manage, you should consider outsourcing your contact centre services. Contact us to learn how the Corporate Connect team can help.