The customer experience starts right from the promotion of product or service by the company till the buying process and after sales service. A good customer experience can be evaluated by repeat buying or repeat sale. Companies have rated customer experience as one of the most important criteria for customer satisfaction, goodwill and to increase brand equity in the market.
According to research by Esteban Kolsky, 13% of unhappy customers will share their complaint with 15 or more people.
Furthermore, only 1 in 25 unhappy customers complain directly to you.
Here are a few best practices when it comes to training your employees and creating guidelines and policies for how you business handles customer complaints:
- Any problem must be documented and reported to the appropriate person for resolution;
- Establish a ‘complaint owner’ (i.e., someone who is charge of resolving the complaint);
- Deliver a response within a predetermined amount of time; e.g., a complaint is received within 24 hours and a plan to resolve it is established within 72 hours;
- Define actions and behaviors your team must follow to deliver a consistent customer resolution experience;
- Cases remain open until the root problem is identified and successfully resolved.
There are many ways to handle customer complaints effectively. Next, let’s look at 5 specific strategies that help to improve a customer’s experience.
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Best tips to handle customer complaints
The next time you receive a customer complaint, follow these tips to help transform it into a golden opportunity for your business.
1. Listen and understand
Always listen to your customers. They have complained for a reason and it is important to understand why they are complaining. Research has shown that customers care more about quality than a fast response – Take time to listen and understand what their problem is. To maintain quality from all support personnel, use a customer service knowledge base
2. Apologize
Don’t be afraid to apologize for a mistake. Many customers are simply looking for an apology and acknowledgement of their complaint, yet so many businesses are hesitant to admit when a mistake has been made.
Don’t underestimate the importance of an apology:
Research by The Nottingham School of Economics found that unhappy customers are more willing to forgive a company that offers an apology as opposed to being compensated.
In the findings from the study, 45% of customers withdrew their negative evaluation of a company in light of an apology, whereas only 23% of customers withdrew their negative evaluation in return for compensation.
The researchers concluded that when a customer hears the words “I’m sorry”, it triggers an immediate instinct to forgive.
But, don’t just stop at the apology; follow through with a promise to resolve the complaint.
3. Find a solution
When your customer has a legitimate complaint, you need to find the root cause and solve it.
Give your customer service team the authority to handle the majority of customer complaints to avoid passing your customer onto a series of people and managers. If the issue has been or can be repeated, make the necessary changes so you do not receive another complaint.
Let’s take a look at a customer complaint example:
Imagine you have a customer whose account is up for renewal. You reach out to them manually, before taking payment (as required by GDPR) and they are happy to continue with their subscription.
But, for some reason or another, you charge them twice for the same amount – and they are not happy and decide to cancel their account. Giving your employees the authority to handle these kinds of issues means allowing them to issue a refund and handle the request without having to escalate the case to a supervisor. It also means that the customer gets their issue solved quickly.
Once you have issued the refund, you can send them the following customer complaint refund email template.
4. Follow up with the customer
Follow up with your customers to make sure they are satisfied with the solution. This can be in the form of a follow up email or survey asking for feedback on how the complaint was handled.
Almost 70% of customers leave a company because they believe you don’t care about them.
Very few companies follow up with their customers.
Following up shows you care. And this makes the customer feel important.
5. Exceed Expectations
You have acknowledged the mistake, fixed the problem and followed up.
Now, it’s your chance to go one step further and exceed customer expectations, whether this is to send a hand-written thank you note or to give the customer early access to your new product features.
Remember that customers pay close attention to the small details when they’re feeling distressed. The way you interact with customer complaints after their problem is resolved sets the stage for future encounters.
In fact, if your post-complaint actions are done successfully, the next time your customer talks about your business, this will be the message they communicate most
Customer complaint checklist
Solving customer complaints is a lot like putting out fires. It’s reactive, and no matter how good your product or service is, it’s impossible to please all of your customers.
The next time you receive a complaint, use the following 5 step check list in order to respond, resolve and keep your customer happy.
- Acknowledge the complaint
- Inform the customer that you are taking action
- Record and categorize the customer complaint
- Resolve the complaint according to company policy
- Follow up with the customer to make sure they are satisfied
Handling customer complaints is an ongoing process. You can use web forms to collect complaints from your website and then use customer service software to store the complaint on each customer profile. Remember to monitor complaints on a weekly or monthly basis so you can track new complaints and trends, and be sure to follow up on open complaints.
It’s worth reminding, but if a customer leaves you, you lose business. So, don’t be afraid to escalate reoccurring complaints to top management in order to get them resolved quickly.
Proactive complaint handling
As mentioned earlier, not all customers will complain directly to you.
The web enables customers to share their feedback in multiple channels, including forums, comparison websites, social media networks and more. Without taking the necessary steps, these complaints can snowball, and even go viral.
This means you need to engage in social listening and get proactive in customer complaint handling.
Finding complaints online is not easy, but here are a few suggestions on where to start:
- Have any negative comments been made on your blog?
- Has your brand name been mentioned on Twitter?
- Do customers post messages on your Facebook brand page?
- Has anyone left a bad review on your Google My Business page?
- Are the comments made on your YouTube channels positive?
- Is your brand listed in any complaint directories or forums when you search in Google?
All these channels will need to be monitored. If you don’t respond, readers will assume you don’t care. If you respond to messages online, it can be seen as though you are making an effort and that you do care. This act alone can inspire brand loyalty and customer confidence.
Conclusion…
A customer complaint highlights a problem, whether that’s a problem with your product, employees or internal processes, and by hearing these problems directly from your customers, you can investigate and improve to prevent further complaints in the future. Customer experience management is overseeing the process of processing and executing the reactions to the customer reactions. This would be carried out either to meet or exceed the expectations of the customer and thereby increase customer satisfaction.
Furthermore, research finds that customers’ whose complaints are handled quickly can often turn into loyal customers and even brand advocates.
In fact, a study by Harvard Business Review found that customers who have a complaint handled in less than 5 minutes go on to spend more on future purchases.
Simply put, a customer complaint can become very profitable when you can resolve their problem quickly.
