Ten Tips For Dealing With Customer Complaints Online
As the power and popularity of the Internet has grown, business transactions traditionally conducted off-line—such as purchasing, payment, and product—are increasingly being carried out on-line. Given the billions of daily interactions that take place both by mouse and mortar, it is to be expected that a certain amount of misunderstandings and errors will occur. The following tips will help you craft an approach to dealing with complaints that encourages your customers to communicate with you and assures them that quick and reasonable actions will be taken:
1. Make it easy for customers to complain.
Your customer complaint policy should spell out in detail:
- How customers can contact the company when they have a complaint or problem.
- Where in the organization to make complaints relating to specific areas.
- Who is responsible for dealing with complaints from different areas.
2. View complaints as gifts.
Complaints can be a great source of information, innovation and inspiration. They can help you gain valuable ideas for new products/services, recover a customer who might have otherwise decided to go elsewhere, fix problems that could be the cause of other customers leaving, or gain a customer for life by resolving the complaint quickly and efficiently.
3. Thank the customer.
A simple ‘thank you’ is one way to let the customer know that you appreciate the time and effort that they have taken to inform you about a problem with your company’s service or product that you need to know about. Let the customer know why or in what way the complaint has contributed to you or your business.
4. Let the customer vent.
Trying to resolve the situation without first listening to the customer’s feelings almost never works. Only after your customers have vented can they start to hear what you have to say and begin the process of problem solving. Remember, if you try to stop a customer from expressing their feelings, you will push them from annoyed to irate in a matter of moments.
5. Sincerely apologize.
Here are some guidelines:
- Apologize even if you are not the person who made the mistake. Remember, your customer relates to you as the representative of the company and takes your apology as a corporate mea culpa if not a personal one.
- Apologize even if the customer is in the wrong by saying something like “I’m sorry you are having a problem.” What difference does it make if the customer is right or wrong? Ultimately the solution comes down to fixing the problem, not assigning blame.
- Don’t use your apology as a preemptive strike by making it the first thing you say to an upset customer. Give them time to provide the necessary details so you can make the apology more person and specific to their circumstances.
6. Identify the elements of the complaint.
It’s easy to assume you know what the customer’s problem is within their first few sentences, because you’ve probably heard it all a hundred times before. Often, however, how a problem appears at first glance changes upon closer examination. In order to resolve a customer’s complaint, you need to understand exactly what elements are contributing to their dissatisfaction.
7. Fix the problem.
Often you can easily remedy the situation by changing an invoice, redoing an order, waiving or refunding charges, or replacing a defective product. At other times, however, fixing the problem is more complex because the damage or mistake cannot simply be redone. In these instances, mutually acceptable compromises need to be reached.
There will be times when, after gathering the facts of a situation, you will be unable to resolve an issue immediately. In this case it is important to let your customer know an estimation of how long it will take to take action on the complaint and what you will be doing to resolve the issue in the meantime.
8. Give a care token.
A care token is a specific action that you take as a way of letting customers know that you are sorry for the mistake that was made, regret any stress or inconvenience they were caused and that you care about keeping their business. A few examples:
- An airline gives you a coupon for a free drink and movie on your next flight because by the time they got to your row, they ran out of that spicy tomato drink you like.
- A restaurant buys you a glass of wine on the house because you were not seated for your 7:30 p.m. reservation until 8:00 p.m.
- The one-hour photo shop gives you a free roll of film when they take longer than an hour to process your holiday snaps.
9. Follow Up.
Calling or emailing your customers after you have taken steps to solve their problem is an important part of bringing closure to a customer’s complaint. Contacting a customer after a service breakdown has occurred helps ensure that the problem has been completely resolved to the customer’s satisfaction and that no other action is required. The personal touch also helps re-establish your company’s credibility while reinforcing your sincere concern that the problem has been resolved.
10. Practice Prevention.
The information you gather from customer complaints can be a valuable source of process improvement for your company. In order to capture this information and make sure you are using it to prevent future problems from occurring, create a formal procedure for recording all incoming customer complaints.
Over time, complaint logs can be analyzed by management
or an employee task team to determine patterns, trends and
root causes that need to be addressed within your company.
In addition, this type of log allows managers to spot check
the system and follow up to make sure complaints are being
handled quickly and fairly. |
