Why should an organisation treat customer complaints as business opportunities?

Befriend the complaints and gain from customer service management!

Complaints are inevitable for every organisation involved in any type of business. In the customer-driven world, no company can afford to ignore their words and suggestions, unless they wish to let them go to their competitors. Though none of us would like to hear it, but unanticipated complaints are the best source to recognize the hidden or unnoticed problems within your product, service, and communication. Moreover, dealing with complaints presents a chance to investigate and rectify the errors for a better customer service management.

The customer doesn’t expect everything will go right all the time; the big test is what you do when things go wrong.

– Sir Colin Marshall

What makes a customer complaint one of the greatest assets for any business?

Dealing with complaints and support calls efficiently brings a huge difference to customer service management. To make your brand stand out, strategise and emphasise on managing them with care and concern. Once your team is aware of what they can gain from customer complaints, it becomes easier to work with the unvarnished information and act on it for improvements.

According to McKinsey, maximising satisfaction with customer journeys has the potential not only to increase customer satisfaction by 20% but also to lift revenue by up to 15% while lowering the cost of serving customers by as much as 20%.

Enlisting 5 major points to be treasured from customer communication and complaints:

Problem with the Product

A knotty call from your customer is a way to inspect your product or service in question. No doubt that every company tries its best to live up to the customer expectations and deliver the best to maintain their market position. But, not every time does it happen! On other note, different customers may have their own unique angle of perfection related to the usage of the product. Hence, every complaint and feedback statement is an opportunity to know the missing part and bridge a gap towards flawlessness. An annoyed customer is a blessing in disguise as he draws your attention towards something that your product or service lacks at present. It helps you to help him and prevent more such complaints from others by taking timely actions.   

People and their Behaviour

A customer interaction with a company’s representatives develops their level of trust and satisfaction. No matter how good your product is on the whole, if you do not have a good team of employees attending them, you may certainly lose them. To get the best of both worlds, you need to have exceptional customer service along with an excellent product. Customer complaints are often about the people communicating with them during marketing, sales, support and service. Your own employees can be a big threat for you. It’s important to consider the feedback of your customers about the employees serving them, their behavior, knowledge, expertise, genuineness, humbleness, understanding and communication and accordingly train them for future.

Internal Processes and their Impact

At times, an outsider’s view gives a better idea of what and how to do things in a superior way. Generally, a customer is concerned with the product as per the company commitment and well-timed support as required. But at an organisational level, there are many stages to hit the nail on the head for customers. The customer might not be aware of the inside scenario, hence an unbiased complaint is a chance that highlights the system and coordination loopholes. For example, service delivery, delays, methods of communication, unavailability, mismanagement, unanswered or missed calls, etc. are the issues that customer complaints bring to the notice of an organisation for improvement.

Information and its Influence

One of the most common reasons for customer complaints is the lack of information or misleading facts that tend to confuse them. It is necessary to align sales with support to know what is being promised is being delivered. If not coordinated, this messes up the situation. The customer may be under some impression about the product, its usage, and features, whereas he may not be properly guided or knowing about the actual use. In such cases, the ball is in your court to dealing with customer complaints fairly and winning them over. Subsequently, ensure uniformity and consistency in the realistic marketing, creating self-help directories, user manuals, and knowledge base for the employees for customer service management.

Trends and relevant Decisions

If you actually want to benefit from customer complaints then don’t forget to cover the whole nine yards in every interaction related to customer service management. By this, I want to put the focus on the information that can be collected from every call and feedback. The next step is analysing the same to control the issues, prevent it from re-occurring and direct the further actions at individual, team, product and business levels. Learn from the mistakes that lead to customer complaints, notice the trends and common causes and implement the future policies for enhancement. This certainly helps to determine what, where, when and how wrong things can be corrected.

How to neutralize the negative complaints and turn them into positive relationships?

As per a survey, 13% of the customers who are not satisfied with the services tend to share their negative and unhappy experiences with 15 or even more people. On the other side, 72% of satisfied customers share a positive experience with 6 or more people.

A customer with a complaint actually indicates their trust in your organisation. They are investing their time to contact you, explain the issue and expect you to solve them. Dealing with customer complaints with every call to understand the reason of complaint is modernised with the use of a comprehensive platform dedicated to customer service management.

Presenting a process cycle with 3 A’s to imbibe a perfect customer complaint handling strategy:

Appreciate – Accept – Act

customer service management

Appreciate Their Trust

Customers facing problems with your services may choose to either leave you uninformed or connect to share their problem and get it solved. Once they knock your door, it’s solely your responsibility to respect their association. Appreciate if they are making efforts to reach out to you for support.

Accept The Fault

Acceptance is a great virtue. It’s always a plus point for the company if they are able to make a customer rather than just making a sale. Emotional bonding is a win-win all the time for both. Make it a company policy to accept complaints, understand their frustration and consider your fault for the same.

Act To Resolve

Last but not the least, once you have heard them, identified the issues, it’s time to act and fix the issues. A warm gesture and a token of making them feel like a valued customer does magic. Never look at a complaining customer as a threat, but rather an opportunity to act and get the glory of winning them over again.

Are you ready to leverage maximum advantage with customer complaints?

To begin with, incorporate a concrete CRM policy for your organisation. Take the help of technology to simplify the business processes and streamline the collaborations. To flow with the modern ICT-based world, it is very important to adopt a multi-channel approach, provide self-service medium to customers, and make it easy and convenient for them to connect with you. An all-inclusive customer service management platform for your employees to manage the users and the related issues is the perfect way to make most out of the customer complaints. You can speak to our experts and consult them for a decision. Keep following us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google plus for more updates.

Make your move now!

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