Handling Customers Complaints

**Spiral** · #1 (**permalink**) 08-28-2006, 01:06 AM

Handling Customers Complaints

Submitted by Douglas Hanna

It’s inevitable. People will complain about your service. It’s what happens when you provide any type of service. You cannot avoid unhappy customers, despite how hard you try. The difference, though, is how you handle those complaints.

By far, the most important thing to keep in mind when you handle complaints is that the customer is mad, frustrated and/or angry. He or she may not act very logically, be friendly as usual or anything like that. You need to be prepared to deal with this type of customer until the issue is resolved.

Be nice. Never be rude to your customer. If he or she is being rude to you, simply state that being rude to you won’t help get the issue resolved.
Be considerate and apologize. Listen to the customer’s problem and genuinely try to help him or her. Be sure to apologize throughout the entire complaint process about any inconveniences caused, money lost, etc.
Compensate! When customers are angry, don’t be cheap. If their sites have been down, credit them. Even if it’s not your fault, offer credits and other incentives for them to be happy and continue using your service. Offer a discount on an upgrade (if that’s what they have to do), buy them a domain, whatever you have to do that’s within reason and your profit margin on the customer. Basically, be prepared to completely forget about your profit margin with the angry customer. You may even have to lose some money.
Actually resolve the issue. A lot of companies will keep compensating and apologizing, but don’t seem to resolve the issue. Resolve the issue and do whatever you can to do so. Then, make sure the problem doesn’t happen in the future.

That’s how you handle a particular customer that’s angry. Complaints actually provide a wealth of information and an interesting view on what you need to improve upon.

Do you get a lot of complaints about your billing process? It may be:

Time to consider a new billing system
Time to change some billing processes
Time to hire new billing representatives
Time to find someone who can improve the entire billing process or at least improve the specific problems

It should be obvious what you need to improve by the amount of complaints you get about a particular part of your business. Do you get lots of complaints about downtime? Then you should work on improving your servers’ reliability. You need to ask yourself the question “Is this issue as a whole really causing us to lose customers and our reputation?” If it is, start investing on improving it.

You should always save copies of all complaints. Categorize them and include what was done to resolve the issue. That way, you have an idea of what needs to be improved and what to do if the issue happens again. When you know what you need to do in the future to resolve the issues, you’ll be able to act quicker and more efficiently.

Another great way to stop issues from repeating in the future is to ask customers “What could we have done better?” after the complaint process. Be sure to ask customers this regularly (“What can we do better?”) so you can stop issues before they occur. Generally, a customer will let a minor issue go one or two times before formally complaining.

Be sure to respond to all complaints. Even if the complaint is subtle (i.e. a customer saying “I want to update my credit card number. Your billing system is so confusing.), be sure to address it like a bigger, more formal complaint. The customer is upset, angry, frustrated, etc. and that’s what matters – not over what medium or how serious the complaint is.

One of the most important things about complaints is following up. A personal follow up should be given for every complaint sent to your company (over any medium) by the person who originally handled it. If the follow up is an automated, “Please let us know if you need any further assistance” type follow up, you’re almost defeating the purpose. Make sure the follow up is personal and sincere.

Ritz Carlton Hotels has a system where as soon as a guest complains, the staff member who hears it is responsible for resolving it and following up. Implement a system like that in your company and make sure you stick with it. Your follow-ups should include:

Another apology about any inconveniences caused, money lost, etc.
A brief summary (as in one or two sentences) of the problem.
A brief summary (also one or two sentences) of what the resolution was.
What your company is doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again. (the longest part)
Information on how to contact a supervisor, senior representative, member of the management, etc. in case there are any similar problems in the future.
Another apology and a “Let me know if you have any further questions, comments, or concerns” type thing
Name and more personal contact information

Keep these things in mind, and you’ll learn to appreciate complaints and use them to help improve your business. Just as importantly, your customers will be happier and appreciate you going the extra mile to make them happy.