Today's customers need instant gratification and have more power than ever, especially in today's internet-driven world. If they have a positive customer experience, they will share it with family, friends, and connections which leads to positive word-of-mouth recommendations at no extra cost. But what if they don't receive a positive customer experience? They will complain and this can quickly erode all the trust and goodwill that people associate with your brand. However, customer complaints can be good for your business in countless ways.
Let us read on!
The primary silver lining behind customer complaints is that a problem, pain point, or challenge is highlighted to you. Whether that's a problem with your products, services, internal processes, or employees, you can consider customer complaints as invaluable insights to prevent similar occurrences in the future. These insights can also be used to improve your products, services, internal processes, or employees to turn your customers into loyal customers and even become your brand advocates.
How to analyze customer complaints?
You can leverage complaint analysis to track, interpret, analyze, categorize, and handle customer complaints. You should ask the following questions when a customer makes a complaint:
Has this happened before?
Has the customer reported this previously too?
How often does the same complaint is made by other customers?
Is there a pattern to how the complaint was received?
How it can be resolved?
Once you have found answers to the above questions, you can prevent them from happening again.
Best practices to handle customer complaints
The key to overcoming common customer complaints is by creating a clear and streamlined response to address the complaints of your customers.
All customer complaints should be documented and reported to the appropriate person for a swift resolution.
You should establish responsibility for who is in charge of resolving the complaint and by when.
Deliver a response within a predetermined amount of time.
Clearly define the actions, behaviors, authority, and responsibilities of your team to deliver a consistent customer resolution experience.
Let's now have a look at how you can transform customer complaints into opportunities.
Listen to your customers with empathy
Do make it a point to listen to your customers' problems with empathy. Understandably, they have complained for a reason and you should carefully listen to them. It is equally important that all problems must be quickly addressed without expecting the customer to wait endlessly. You should also have a customer service knowledge base in place.
Don't hesitate to apologize
If there is a mistake from your end, don't be afraid to render a heartfelt apology. Don’t underestimate the significance of an apology! According to research by The Nottingham School of Economics, unhappy customers are more willing to forgive a brand that offers an apology as opposed to being compensated.
However, you should never just stop at the apology and always make it a point to follow through with a promise and real intent to resolve the complaint.
Find a solution
You must make every possible effort to proactively address all customer complaints. For this, you need to give proper authority to your customer service team so they can avoid passing your customers onto a series of staff members and managers.
Follow up with the customer
Always always make it a point to follow up with a disgruntled customer without being pushy or invasive. This can be in the form of a follow-up mail, survey, or call on how the complaint was handled to their satisfaction.
Undoubtedly, customer complaints are important and they are an excellent way to collect direct feedback from your esteemed customers so you can improve your products, services, internal processes, and employees.
Find out how you can create more loyal customers, improve your products and services, and deliver exceptional customer experiences using Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. Call or email us at C.I.G Consultants now.
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