Archive for the ‘Customer service’ Category

Many of us have to deal with complaints at one time or another, whether it is because the service we get is not up to scratch or whether we are on the receiving end of a complaint at work.  When we are at work we may find ourselves constrained by a sense that the organisation wants us to handle complaints in a certain way.  It’s true that effective organisations will have developed complaints policies and procedure to help complaints be dealt with well, but that doesn’t mean we have to forget the personal touch that is often at the essence of good complaints handling. We know this because we help organisations deal with complaints well.

So how can you deal with complaints effectively?

Here are some ideas to help you handle those complaints well:

• Dealing with complaints is about people.  The human touch goes a long way to solving a complaint.  A complainant often wants understanding of their position.  This is often translated as “empathy” in corporate procedures and policies. So why not show you are taking the complaint seriously and recognise the emotion that is within the complaint?
• People need to know how to complain and what will happen to their complaint.  This is often described as “transparency”, “openness”, and “fairness”.  So you can see how these concepts get built into complaints policies. This means we should think about thanking people for raising their concerns because that means we can resolve them.
• Sorry is often the hardest word. It is okay to apologise. An apology, well meant, real and appropriate is often what the complainant will be seeking.  If you read the reports of the various complaints ombudsmen often a lack of a meaningful apology causes a complaint to run and run.
• Then there is the concept of redress.  That in corporate terms is simply “putting things right”. Often the complainant will fill their complaint with many issues to emphasise the importance to the complainant of what has gone wrong. This may be an attempt to get you to take notice of the issue.  Sometimes this is a detailed list of grievances and that can cloud the real issue.  Simply asking what will put things right can unlock a previously difficult complaint.
• Learning from complaints is usually another feature of a complaints handling policy.  That is because if we can stop it recurring then we will have happier customers but also because some complainants are motivated by trying to stop this situation happening to someone else.

So you can see why corporate complaints handling policies use formalised terms but that doesn’t mean your complaints handling has to be formal and stuffy. A real understanding of the customer’s concerns will often be the key to dealing with complaints.

If you need help with your complaints handling we offer a range of training and development solutions. We train people to deal with complaints across the UK, our experience spans over 20 years and so our help is just a phone call or email away.

Don’t rely of good luck. Instead rely on good complaints handling skills. Make sure you are trained to deal with complaints effectively.

Alison Miles-Jenkins
Managing Director
Training To Achieve (UK) Ltd

News about complaint handling

The news just announced is that complaints to the Banking Ombudsman Service have risen alarmingly.  A recent new BBC announcement said that they are up 15% on 2010. Over half of these complaints were upheld by the Financial Ombudsman.  One commentator in the article urges Banks to invest more resources into better complaints handling.

Are customers complaining more easily?

One issue in today’s economy is that customers are tightening their belts and so are less tolerant when things go wrong.  This happens at a moment when organisations are stretched and often there is pressure on staff to deal with matters more quickly.

How is the cost of complaints handling rising?

In this environment, complaints, when handled poorly, result in a significant increase in cost as customers seek to escalate their approach through more frequent contact, often seeking a higher authority to assist.  Hence the Ombudsman is in demand in Banking.  The costs of these complaints are rather like an iceberg.  On the surface the numbers of complaints are bad enough but the huge size of the problem lies underneath. Each complaint is a protracted wrangle involving telephone calls, letters and sometimes even threats of litigation.  Therefore each complaint is costing money to deal with.

It need not be like this, an effective complaints policy and attention to the basics can pay dividends.  For more information take a look at our tips for handling complaints.

Alison Miles-Jenkins
Managing Director
Training To Achieve (UK) Ltd

Why is it that complaints are so hard to deal with?  Recent headlines show that in the banking sector fines have been levied for poor complaints handling. There has also been an extensive report issued about complaints handling in the NHS, which has lessons for many organisations given that it deals with a wide variety of complaint situations. It can usefully help anyone interested in managing complaints well. This report reinforces the message that many people find complaints so hard to deal with.

The pain the complaints cause

The pain many organisations suffer when handling complaints often includes increased costs of dealing with customers flowing from:

• repeated contacts from customers who often try a multi-channel approach by phone, in person or in writing and even social media campaigns such as using Twitter, Facebook, etc.
• requests for compensation
• escalation to more senior staff tying up resources
• and worst case: legal action can be the last resort of the disgruntled customer

Your staff can suffer great stress with all of this activity too.  But it need not be like that.

Great complaints handling

If you want to get the benefits of great complaints handling, where do you start? The answer lies in part with knowing a complaint when you see it and having staff trained to deal with the complaints effectively.

So apart from training in handling complaints, what else can be done? A good place to start is to review your complaints handling process. What you are looking for is a process that identifies a complaint quickly so that it can be dealt with as a complaint effectively from the outset and not inadvertently overlooked.

As the report recently published by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman identified: “When a complaint is made, delays in responding, or a failure to listen, to apologise, or take into account individual needs can make an already difficult situation worse.”  This advice points not only to good complaints resolution processes but to having a healthy attitude towards complaints. This attitude is often harder to acquire than a process improvement. This is because a culture of effective complaints handling needs you to show leadership to your people and to get some effective training and coaching to help staff resolve complaints effectively.

Ten tips for great complaints handling

To help you resolve complaints more effectively our top ten tips for great complaints handling are:

1. Complaints handling process

Develop a great complaints handling process.  Look at the process you have for resolving complaints.  If you were a complainant trying to complain would it be easy to use? From your perspective is it fair, efficient, transparent and quick?  If it isn’t can you improve it to be easier for your staff and customers to use, reducing the costs of complaints handling.

2. Watch out for complaints

Catch complaints early: when things go wrong for a customer, make sure when a customer complains you identify the complaint as a complaint and deal with it as such.

3. Apologise to the complainant 

Remember that an apology can be a powerful remedy. Sometimes all that is needed is to say sorry. The research into complaints handling has shown that recognising that something has gone wrong and apologising for that can often be all that is needed to get the conversation with the complainant moving in a constructive direction. After all apologies cost nothing, are easy to deliver and can help the complainant move on.

4. Explain what caused the complaint 

Offer a thorough explanation of what went wrong. Don’t do this in a way that sounds like excuses are being made, but explain the reasons why a complaint was caused.  Make sure the customer does not feel like they are being fobbed off. If a mistake has been made then acknowledge that.  It is interesting that the second biggest factor for doctors and dentists when handling complaints is that there is no acknowledgement of mistakes.  The same could well be true for your customers as it is often hard for employees to acknowledge that a mistake has been made, they may need to be given permission by you to do this.  They may need some training to help with this.

5. Reassure the complainant

Reassure the complainant that steps will be taken to stop the issue recurring.  Often people who complain want to know that it won’t happen again or to someone else. However, be careful to make sure that the lessons learned are not lost. You need to have a way of doing this which can include:

• better training for staff
• improvements in processes or systems
• or simply better communication earlier to explain what might go wrong at the point of purchase.

If the customer knows the risks when buying then they make an informed decision and that can help.

6. Own the complaint

Don’t be defensive.  If a complainant gets the feeling that you are evading the issue, making excuses and not trying to help it will only make matters worse.

7. Enjoy that complaint

Have a great attitude.  Often the attitude of your people when dealing with the complaint can make all the difference.  A poor attitude is likely to make the complaint worse and the complainant will then often seek to escalate the complaint to a higher authority.  This ends up involving you in more cost and time to deal with the complaint. Consider having some of your team trained to become experts in handling your complaints.  This can reduce the overall training cost and provide you with a small team of dedicated complaints handlers rather than have all your people struggling to handle complaints.

8. Put it right 

Find out what the complainant thinks will solve the problem and try and deliver that.  Taking remedial action is as important as apologising.  This may also mean reviewing a decision or process.

9. Remain focused on the customer

Be customer focussed.  It may sound easy but it is not.  Emotions often run high in complaints handling and need acknowledging.  If the complainant knows by the way you react you are trying to resolve the matter that will make all the difference.

10. Give your complaints handlers support

Support your complaints handling staff. Those who deal with complaints need help and support.  The emotional drain on your people can be significant and so having an opportunity to debrief with a colleague and provide support can help.  Coaching can be a great way of assisting with this.  Do you have a supportive and coaching style in your team? If you don’t, you might want to talk to us to get some help.

Complaints handling made easy?

Complaints handling is not easy.  It is often something that is difficult to do.  But it need not be like this.  It is possible to handle even the most challenging complaints well.  After all consider the Ombudsman I mentioned earlier who is often dealing with life and death issues in the NHS. Her team are getting compliments from complainants about their help in solving complaints. You could be getting those too.

SMARTER Resolutions It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that we are a couple of weeks into January 2011? Everyone’s talking New Year’s Resolutions – and some people will have made and broken these already! The really committed among us may well have applied the acronym SMARTER to our resolutions, treating them as we do our work objectives, and so standing more chance that we’ll achieve them. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-related… and don’t forget the newly added Evaluated and Reviewed).	Alison Miles-Jenkins BA FCIPD, Consultant, Trainer, Speaker, Coach Managing Director Training To Achieve (UK) Ltd Turning professionals into more successful people managers and business owners since 1990
Look back and celebrate I don’t know about you, but at Training To Achieve we didn’t just do the welcoming in of the new Year. We celebrated 2010. We didn’t see the year as deserving to be shrugged off or discarded. It was a time to look back and celebrate our achievements. As learning and development experts we know how important it is for people to be motivated, to feel comfortable in their own skin, with a balanced understanding of strengths and development areas. This will help them to flourish and to achieve. We understand how powerful it is for people to acknowledge and be proud of past achievements. This provides a strong platform for taking on further challenges, to go beyond the comfort zone, take risks, learn new things and become even more successful. When I think back to the year that’s just gone, I get a great source of pleasure and pride when I think about how our company has helped our clients and their employees to achieve, especially during such challenging times.	Ask the Editor Have a question about a development or training issue? Email us your questions and we’ll answer them in the next issue. Would you like a daily tip? Just send us an email and we’ll send you a fresh tip every day.
Here’s my top ten – in no particular order: Launching our Brown Bag Lunch courses, bringing real value, a powerful learning experience and lunch to clients who were struggling to afford full day courses Setting up a scheme to support Cancer Research UK. We mainly grow through referrals and repeat business and so to thank all clients who refer us on to others, we donate £100 each time to the charity Training to be an accredited digital coach, so we can help our clients who are struggling to understand the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of using social media for business Going into a joint venture with a provider of a fantastic online 360 feedback tool that has worked wonders for many of our larger clients Launching our free Privilege Club offering clients free support, advice and preferential rates Offering free coaching sessions to clients whilst we were being trained further in corporate, executive and personal performance coaching – now another string to our bow Meeting Sir Bob Geldof in July which was truly inspirational and encouraged us to expand our horizons even further with our clients Travelling to Australia to agree a joint venture with a Sydney-based consultancy, enabling us to provide our great services to Asia Pacific clients. Plus a fabulous meeting with Willis in Sydney will hopefully enable us to help them in London as well with 2011 Learning and development events Getting to the finals of a Businesswoman of the Year competition and being given the opportunity to talk to groups of aspiring career women and working mums Winning the Education and Lifelong Business Award in November, and being able to thank all the clients who have supported us over the last 20 years. What were your highs?
As we close our first newsletter for 2011, all that remains is to wish you well for the coming year and hope you achieve everything you set out to achieve. And don’t forget to get in touch to ensure you meet your training needs and guarantee that you keep your New Year’s resolution! We look forward to hearing from you. Alison Miles-Jenkins Managing Director Training To Achieve (UK) Ltd 0845 165 6269 www.t2achieve.com	Follow us on: Facebook Linked in Ecademy Twitter