How to Handle Customer Complaints and Improve your Customer Service
Customers tend to complain from time to time. Despite the fact that customer complaints are normal – it can be detrimental to your organization if you don’t have the right system in place to handle them. Usually when a customer calls to make a complaint, they expect to get the problem resolved properly and quickly.
If you do not have the right structure in your organization that can handle that, they may be forced to leave and go to one of your competitors. You should make certain that your employees in your customer department know what is required of them in order to properly handle customer complaint.
These days the pressure to handle customer complaints from angry customers is pretty high. It’s easy for someone to quickly go on social media and talk about the poor experience they have just had with your company. The network effect could also be huge because a lot of persons could get to see that complaint post. As a result of that it will give them the impression that your company is bad.
How to Handle Customer Complaints:
When handling customer complaints some short nuggets you should keep in mind are:
• Try to be helpful and willing to give proper guidance.
• Make certain that your customer service representative know that if one of them can’t handle a particular issue. Let them hand it over to someone else who has the proper skills and knowledge to resolve it.
• Whatever you do don’t try to argue with your customers and always have the right tone in your voice.
• Never transfer them to a voice mailbox without their approval.
• Be open to feedback
• Ensure that your company has a lot of different channels customers can use to complain. For example by calling, email, messaging customer service representatives on your website, SMS etc.
• Try to make your customer complaint system flexible enough to support customers from different cultures and demographics
• Make your complaint resolution process seamless in order to reduce the resolution time. This will open up space for your employees to handle more customers in a single day more efficiently
These are just some simple tips you should keep in mind when implementing a proper customer complaint system in your company. When handling customer complaints a simple process that you can implement can be seen below.
Step 1
Give customers your full attention and undivided attention by listening attentively while interacting with them. This will show them that you care whole heartedly about their problem.
Step 2
Agree that there is a problem and never disagree or try to argue with them. Apologize and let them know that you’re sorry that they’ve encountered a problem.
Step 3
Try and resolve the complaint and make certain to thank the customer for letting you know that they’ve encountered a problem and they are always free to ask for help when needed.
This is a very simple strategy that you can use right now in order to make your complaint system a lot better. Keep in mind that you should invest money in designing a great customer complaint infrastructure in your organization. These would include investment in IT infrastructure, include a great review and resolution process and proper employee training. A record system to capture customer data would also be beneficial.
The results will worth the investment, a lot of companies right now are losing dollars just because of angry customers. In summary properly handling customer complaints can help build a great relationship between the organization and its customers. This will help to keep customers happy and help to strengthen your company’s reputation. As a result of that you will come to reap great benefits, including having a great edge over your competitors.