How to Deal with Customer Complaints
Customer complaints arise when businesses don’t deliver on their commitments or meet customer expectations with regard to the services or products offered. Customers complain for various reasons, including poor customer service or low-quality products/ services.
Hidden information and fees and not keeping promises can cause customers to complain. Customer complaints come in handy for organizations looking to enhance customer satisfaction. Knowing how to address them satisfactorily can be helpful. Discussed below is how to deal with customer complaints.
Know the type of customer you’re dealing with
There are various customer persona types, each motivated by different beliefs, needs, and attitudes. Various customers demonstrate varying complex combinations of behaviors and motivations.
Understanding different customer persona types enables you to find an appropriate way to handle them and respond to their complaints. For instance, when you have to deal with angry customers, you must keep your temper in check and patiently listen to their complaints, then provide them with a solution.
Establish customer complaint policies and guidelines
If you’re looking to provide a satisfactory customer experience, establish formal policies and guidelines to help log, investigate, as well as resolve customer dissatisfaction and other issues. These policies and procedures are meant to turn dissatisfied customers into satisfied ones while aligning your customer support team’s actions and responses. They also analyze parts of your business for better experiences. Best practices to consider when establishing customer complaint policies and guidelines include:
- Documenting and reporting any customer complaint to the right personnel for resolution
- Delivering a response within a preset amount of time
- Keeping complaint cases open until their root cause is identified and addressed
- Defining the behavior and actions your customer support team must adhere to to ensure consistent customer resolutions are delivered
- Establishing a complaint owner, an individual in charge of handling complaints
Actively Listen to customer complaints
When a client comes to you with a complaint, they expect to be heard. While their concerns might seem insignificant to you, the fact that they took their time to reach out clearly indicates how significant the issues are to them. Listen to your customer’s feedback actively and allow them to vent their frustrations they might have. Giving them time to talk will enable them to cool down, after which you can ask the right questions to understand the cause of their complaint.
Acknowledge the complaint
After hearing the customer out and asking them questions to understand their concerns, acknowledge the complaint by expressing regret for the negative experience. Doing so doesn’t mean you must agree with what they’re saying.
It’s a sign that you understand and respect their feelings and thoughts. When responding, apologize, and don’t forget to express your desire to help better the situation. This makes them feel valued and appreciated, boosting their confidence in your brand.
Find a solution promptly and follow up
Upon gathering all the details you require, find a solution that will satisfy the customer. Also, finding the solution sooner will make the client very happy. Once you find a solution, contact the customer, apologize to them again, and ensure everything they had issues with is taken care of. If they’re happy with your response, they’ll likely come back for your services and even talk to others about the good customer support they got from you.
Endnote
The way you handle customer complaints significantly impacts their experience with your company. Implementing these tips when dealing with customer complaints can help.
