There are no businesses that look forward to receiving complaints from their customers. It can be difficult to hear anything negative about your company, particularly if you’re the owner. However, for the vast majority of companies, it’s going to happen and how you deal with these complaints will dictate what happens next. It may seem counterintuitive but customer complaints can actually be a positive experience, allowing for insight and growth.
Customer feedback, both positive and negative can offer a wealth of useful information. However, most of this feedback will be shared between consumers, via word of mouth. When a client reaches out to a business with a complaint, this is an opportunity to collect data and potentially create good advertising from bad. The customer is providing you with an opportunity, rather than remaining unaware of a problem, a complaint allows you to remedy the situation and improve the business.
So, what is the best way to deal with client complaints?
Acknowledge and Apologise
It can be easy to react negatively to a complaint and take the criticism personally, especially if you have a vested interest. However, this will only inflame the situation and most likely lead to you losing the customer altogether. Upon receiving a complaint, the first thing to do is to acknowledge and thank the customer for their feedback.
Many customers are also looking for an apology. This can be quite off-putting for businesses, as if an acknowledgement of error could lead to more complaints. However, an apology can actually be very powerful. In fact, research from the Nottingham School of Economics found that nearly half of the unhappy customers in their study were willing to forgive a company after an apology, contrast this with only a quarter of customers who had received compensation.
Provide a Solution
When a customer goes out of their way to make a complaint, what they really want is some sort of solution. The support that is offered will vary according to the specific circumstances involved. For example, in some cases, you could offer a replacement product, a refund or an alternative arrangement. However, for others, the solution may just be accepting the customer’s feedback and promising to do better.
It’s possible that your customer may not be satisfied with the support that you offer, and in that case, you need to consider some sort of compensation. For example, many businesses will provide a gift card, discount code or some sort of other perk. This may not be the best approach for all businesses but in many cases, it increases the likelihood of a satisfied customer.
Follow Up
Another way to ensure that your customer feels like you are taking their concerns seriously is to follow up with their query. After you have provided support, wait a few days and then contact them to make sure they’re still happy. This could be as a simple as an email or you could give them a quick call. You could even have upper management contact them, as this will make the customer feel particularly well looked after.
Look for Trends
One of the positive elements of customer complaints is that it offers invaluable feedback for your company. There are blind spots in every business and complaints offer insight into what is and isn’t working. Obviously, there can be one-off mistakes but often it can be recurring issues that require fixing.
It’s only possible to spot these trends if you collate all of this information in a single place. Therefore, introduce a complaint policy, where complaints are logged onto a system. The more data that you have, the more likely you are to spot patterns and act accordingly.
Complaints can be difficult, but they can also offer an opportunity to improve your business and create stronger, longer-lasting relationships with your customers.
