Dos and Don’ts of Handling Customer Complaints
Every business grapples with two sides of customer reviews — the approvals and the complaints. As much as everyone prefers the approvals over the complaints, the latter cannot be avoided. Whether it’s a customer concern on your promotions, a tweet about your service, or an unsatisfied review, every business is forced to face an unhappy customer at some point.
How to Handling Customer Complaints
While it might seem exhausting to deal with customer complaints, these can actually be a blessing in disguise. If dealt with efficiently, an unsatisfied customer has the potential to end up endorsing your brand, and becoming a loyal follower! Let’s take a look at how to best deal with customer complaints so as to convert the same into brand loyalty.
Do: Welcome all Complaints and Suggestions
Keep an open mind and have enough platforms for your customers to express how they feel about your product. Whether it’s a thumbs-up for your good work on Facebook or a dislike on Twitter, being approachable to your customer and welcoming all complaints is of utmost importance. Thus, it’s essential that your utilized social media platforms allow for customer reviews and interaction. Keep in mind though, that while social media can be used for short communications, longer, more complex complaints should be addressed through other channels, such as email, or even phone conversations. Ensure you have a customer service team that is monitoring and evaluating the customer feedback coming in, as well as building positivity around incoming complaints.
Businesses that work on customer feedback can go a long way. It’s the best way to give the customer what they want because they literally asked for it! Embrace customer complaints and use them as good advice to increase profits. A customer who sees a change in a company due to his/her complaint becomes a lifetime fan.
Don’t: Lose Your Cool
No matter how flustered or angry a customer might sound, a customer service executive must always stay polite and professional. Calm is key to concluding any complaints in a satisfactory way. Leave your emotions outside of the conversation and try to acknowledge what the customer is telling you. If a customer is angry, try to understand their problem; if a customer is stuck, try to help them; if a customer has a query, address it. It is only natural to feel aggravated by angry customers, but these moments are the true tests of the job. If every business were to disregard angry customers, no business would grow!
It’s important to understand the value of a polite conversation with a flustered customer. They will always remember you for your customer service and stick to your brand for just that. When you make each customer feel valued and taken care of, they will not just become loyal to you but could potentially also get you many more loyal customers. So don’t forget to thank them for calling you and trying your product, no matter the severity of their complaints.
Do: Understand Your Customer
Quick, personalized care of customers leads to long-term and sustained profits. It increases your chances of customer retention, loyalty, and also new customer acquisition through word of mouth. But to personalize your response to customer complaints, you need to first understand your customer. Big data is useful for putting together detailed customer profiles and user personas, so when a complaint does occur, you have detailed insight into the habits of the customer. In turn, this allows you to better deal with the complaint, ensure that the customer is given the attention they deserve, and personalize the entire service experience.
Big data has the potential to give you insight into what the customer wants even before the customer can demand it, thus reducing the likelihood of customer complaints in the first place. After all, when it comes to customer complaints, prevention is usually better than cure!
Don’t: Ignore the Problem
Your customer is taking out the time to reach out to you because they have a genuine dilemma. Ignoring their problem or leaving it unsolved is as good as losing the customer. Even if it’s a small distribution glitch, an honest mistake, or a review you’d rather not hear, make sure you listen carefully. Because once you do, you have to without fail, take the initiative to solve your customer’s problem.
It’s worth remembering that problems are often faced by many but complained about by only a few. Therefore, providing a solution means retaining more customers than you could have anticipated. Solving a complaint also restores trust for your brand in the consumer’s eyes. It makes you a more credible brand to approach and buy from because you take responsibility for your products and services. Nothing grows a business like trust, and good customer service is the fastest way to get there.
In conclusion, the journey of good customer service management ends with an unsatisfied customer advocating for the brand. Even though it might seem counter intuitive, a customer complaint can, in fact, become an opportunity. Use these do’s and don’t to effectively handle customer complaints, and leverage them as sources of value.
