Complaints Handling Courses

Resolving those complaints, getting the upside from putting complaints right

Handling complaints is often stressful for staff. Wouldn’t it be great if you had a range of skills and techniques to help with this and build your confidence?

In house courses run at your offices or a local venue for your team:

• Complaints Handling Programme – two day master-class covering all the essentials you need for all types of complaints handling
• Handling telephone complaints – a one day in-depth course to help you handle complaints on the telephone
• Dealing effectively with written complaints - a one day complaints resolution course to give you the skills to handle written complaints well
• Resolving Face to Face complaints – a one day complaints handling course giving you key skills to manage those difficult conversations
• Complaints Handling Brown Bag lunch – a three hour short programme to brush up key complaints handling skills, with a sandwich lunch included

Need a course for one or two people? Then come on an Open Course.

Behind every complaint are often strong emotions.  There are feelings of disappointment, insecurity, anxiety, frustration, and even anger. Staff often react by simply working to try and solve the problem within the constraints of the systems and processes of your organisation.  This well intended effort can often make matters worse.  The complainant can become even more tense, angry and even unreasonable.  Does this sound familiar?

It is at this point that arguments can accelerate, emotions rise and the stress is increased for the complaints handler is increased.

If you are trying to resolve a complaint, it is at this point that you can feel a personal attack; you can experience feelings of anger, frustration and even fear.  This will very naturally result in you adopting subconsciously a defensive response.  The complainant senses this and becomes even more annoyed and you become frustrated that your efforts to help resolve the situation are not making headway.

Do you find this happening to you? If so, you need a way through this.  A big part of this is to recognise the emotion as well as the complaint.  By dealing with the emotion first, by showing empathy, by building a common understanding, you can then have the confidence of the complainant that you can and will resolve the situation. So how do you do that?

You need to develop a skills set which can be hard to use when you are feeling attacked.  So what you need is a way of developing an approach that will build co-operation, empathy and recognise the feelings behind the complaint.  This involves a range of talents which include effective listening, showing understanding, and moving the complainant into a situation where they are able to listen to you.

To help you get through the challenge of complaints handling you need the key to success.  Why not get a whole bunch of keys to unlock the different types of complaints?  Our approach is to provide these.

This is not just learning the skills but practising them in a safe environment where mistakes can be part of the learning journey.  We provide this in all our programmes.  We have options for you to suit all budgets and the differing experience of your staff.  We are experts at complaints handling training and can help you to be good at it.

Our customer complaint handling training is built on tried and tested methods and on case studies from world class complaints handling operations. It gets to the heart of good and effective complaints handling, and explores the process and methodology needed to create effective customer complaint handling. The main focus will be handling complaints from external customers/stakeholders. Encouraging delegates to view complaints handling in a positive way, the training will be geared to complaints handling procedures within your organisation and will be tailored using appropriate documentation. Methods include tutor input, individual, paired and group exercises, lots of interaction, case studies and review. Delegates will each receive a course manual and handouts.

Depending on your requirements we can offer a menu of options; these are set out in some example complaints resolution and handling course outlines as follows:

• Complaints Handling Programme – two day master-class covering all the essentials you need for all types of complaints handling
• Handling telephone complaints – a one day in-depth course to help you handle complaints on the telephone
• Dealing effectively with written complaints - a one day complaints resolution course to give you the skills to handle written complaints well
• Resolving Face to Face complaints – a one day complaints handling course giving you key skills to manage those difficult conversations
• Complaints Handling Brown Bag lunch – a three hour short programme to brush up key complaints handling skills, with a sandwich lunch included

To read some of our views on customer service have a look at our news where we regularly feature the latest news on complaints handling.

We can also help you devise complaints handling processes as well as deliver great complaints handling training, just give us a call on 0845 165 6269 or email lauren@trainingtoachieveuk.com