Don’t Just Resolve Complaints, Learn From Them

 

If yours is a savvy company, then you work hard to turn out a great product, you employ and train outstanding personnel, you have an effective quality control process and you are dedicated to providing an exceptional customer care program. Congratulations! So, tell me, does all of this effort ensure that you will never have to deal with customer complaints? Of course not! However, any company committed to this level of excellence should take customer complaints seriously, because they are like medicine: good for what ails you (even if you don’t know you are sick). Let me explain.

Nobody likes customer complaints, but where there is smoke there is – or there is about to be– a fire. Customer complaints function as an early warning system to let you know there may be problems coming. So, even though customer complaints can be hard to listen to, and sometimes difficult to deal with, they can also help to make your company stronger in some area if you will just dedicate yourself to taking them seriously and professionally,

Recent studies indicate customer complaints arise from one of three areas: your company’s employees, some aspect of the company or its products, or the customer himself. Most studies confirm that approximately 80% of customer complaints derive from the last two categories

Employees

In most companies, pressure on employees to perform at a high level of efficiency and productivity are intense. Some companies skimp on training – hoping that somehow their employees will be able to learn on the job. This, of course, is a recipe for disaster, and it leads to a lot of customer complaints from frustrated customers who have been poorly served in some way. Even when an employee is experienced and well-trained, that is no guarantee he won’t have a bad day and create a problem for a customer. Who hasn’t accidentally hit the wrong product code or entered the wrong shipping date and left a customer high and dry? Mistakes happen. You can guard against them but you can’t prevent them, you can only learn from them so next time will be different.

Your Company

It is much more likely that the complaint is driven by some flaw in the product or a company process. Maybe the touch screen isn’t quite as flexible as it needs to be, but instead of warning customers that the device shouldn’t be used as a ping pong paddle, your company decides to keep quiet and hope for the best. Soon you are flooded with calls from irate customers with cracked displays or missing pixels because your company was too cheap to make the screen more robust. This is a great way to lose customers. And what about your rebate policy, the one that requires a degree in systematic logic to figure out? People will quit buying your products once they figure out they have about as much of a chance of fulfilling the rebate requirements as they do of winning the lottery. Customers don’t appreciate being taken advantage of. They will complain, and if you don’t do something to fix the problem, you WILL lose them.

Listen to and track your customer’s product and service complaints and you will find a host of new ways to improve your company.

And Then There are the Customers Themselves

Customers – God bless ‘em– are human, too. They make mistakes, they misread the instructions, they order the wrong parts, they use the product for a ping pong paddle, they sometimes get a little bit paranoid, they have inappropriate expectations, etc. If something about the product or the service can be misunderstood or misused, customers will figure out a way to do it. Does this relieve you of your obligation to address their complaints and find a solution for their problem? Do you want to stay in business? I think you know the answer.

In these situations, every customer complaint that arrives from something the customer did, didn’t do, should have done, or misunderstood, provides you with an opportunity to better prepare your products, services and personnel so that in the future these problems are less likely to occur. Notice I said, LESS likely. There will always be customer complaints, and they all represent new opportunities to learn and grow.

 

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December Customer Service Quick Tip of the Month -- Say It and MEAN It

More and more customer service representatives these days are receiving excellent training and they work from good scripts. The only problem is that most customers can tell when you are working from a script and using certain lines with them because you have been trained to do so. Customers pick up on the tone, pace and pitch of your voice – and read your body language if the contact is in person – and they can tell when you are just going through the motions. Customers feel patronized and unimportant when they feel you are only acting like you really care just to get rid of them. From now on, put yourself in the customer’s place. Would you want to be helped by a CSR who really cared about you, or one who was only walking through a script? Now you know what your customer wants, from you, too. If you don’t really care, you can’t really serve.