Complaint handling tips

You may have noticed my recent focus on sharing ideas and tips to assist you with complaints handling.  I’ve spent years working in this area.  I am passionate about customer service and part of this is great complaints resolution.  In the past few months I have had a large number of calls for help from businesses experiencing difficulties in handling complaints.  Why is it now that there is a heightened need?  The economic climate is having a huge effect on the customer psyche.  Customers are even quicker to quibble when they don’t get what they want.  So I thought I’d continue to share my ideas and tips so that you can benefit.

The advantages of good complaints handling make sound economic sense: reducing transaction time, increasing staff morale and customer repurchase rates. So try reflecting on these questions: Does your business have an excellent reputation for customer service?  Does that reputation extend to the way that you deal with customer complaints?

Do you know how many people a complainant will tell about their complaint? The answer is probably at least twenty.  Many more if they use Twitter and have a large following. So make it easy for customers to complain so that you can turn those complaints around before your customer tells someone else that they are not happy.

As a business, every complaint should be treated as important: a good definition of a complaint is “any expression of dissatisfaction’.  Even what seem like small niggles can become large complaints so it is best to nip them in the bud as quickly as possible.

To help you and your people deal with complaints as part of my series of articles on complaints handling I’ve put together three essential tips for complaints handling:

1. Connect with the emotion

Complaints often bring with them a lot of emotion.  It may even feel that this anger and frustration is directed at you.  It is unlikely that you are the target because most likely it is not personal but simply the sum of a number of frustrations over time. In the UK some people get stressed when challenging an organisation or corporate authority and this discomfort may lie behind their raised emotion.

So make sure you are listening to them.  Really listen. Write down key points.  Try not to interrupt.  Give some verbal indications to let them know that you are listening, sometimes these are known as verbal nods. Be careful if you have been trained to adopt a neutral and dead-pan tone in the hope that this will stop the emotion escalating. Often it does not. This is because the complainant will want to know they have connected with you and the importance of their complaint has been recognised.  So you want to sound: interested, concerned and keen to help not deadpan or neutral.

When you can, thank them for raising the issue.  Acknowledge their anger and frustration.  Tell them that you want to help and apologise. Sorry really is sometimes the hardest word but a well-meaning apology early in the conversation will help a great deal.

2. You’re here to help

Let the complainant know you are here to help.  Do this by summarising what they are saying.  People often feel better if they know they’ve been listened to.  You also need to ask them (if it is not obvious) how they want the problem resolved.

Your notes will help a great deal.  By summarising what they want and saying that you are here to help will assist you in getting the conversation onto a productive footing. Try to use their language back to them without being rude!

When you have summarised and explained that you want to help, ask a closed question, such as: “Thank you, I understand from what you have said that you are complaining about X and would like me to do Y to put it right”

Repeat that you are here to help and if you are asked for something that simply is not possible, apologise, give reasons why this is not an available option and then tell them what you can do for them.

3. Resolve it

Now you are onto the solution.  Having explained what you are going to do to resolve the customer’s problem, do it. Don’t promise what you can’t deliver.  Make sure you give realistic timescales and make a note in your diary to follow it up.

Turn that complainant into a satisfied customer. Make sure that your good work is not undone in the follow up stages.  Having gained the confidence of the complainant be clear about what will happen next. When they will hear back? How they can check on progress if they need to do so?

If you have a range of communication channels such as phone, letter, web-chat, email then find out how they would like to hear from you.

So there it is.  It may seem easy on paper and if you want to make it easy in practice you need to make sure your people have the best training. We specialise in complaints and communication with customers. We’ve been doing that at Training To Achieve for many years and have some great experience in the UK in helping people deal with complaints.

Alison Miles-Jenkins
Training to Achieve