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ROI CalculatorAn aspect of any business is dealing with customers' complaints. However, you can look at these annoying issues as a business opportunity. Each complaint that comes in will help your team understand what customers are expecting, along with things that are not working.
Complaint-handling administered properly will give you the ability to discover areas for improvement, aid you in preventing bigger issues from occurring, and enhance the reputation of your business.
Complaint-handling is a structured process by which an organization identifies, addresses, and resolves customer complaints captured in Quality Management System (QMS). The purpose of complaint handling is not only to provide service recovery but also to use customer complaints as a source of information to continuously improve quality.
A good complaint-handling process for an organization also assures compliance with regulations and develops positive relationships with customers.
A customer complaint offers you an opportunity to resolve the issue at hand before it evolves into a more severe problem that impacts your company. When you resolve a complaint quickly and effectively communicate the resolution to the customer, it displays to them that you are committed to providing quality and thereby builds customer trust. Additionally, resolving a complaint leaves them with a sense of being appreciated and valued by your organization, which increases your overall Customer Retention Rate (CRR) because they will likely keep returning to you.
At the onset of the complaint management process, the key to being successful is listening intently to the customer's complaint when it is presented to you. When a customer posts a review, provides feedback via a suggestion box in an establishment, or shares with you their complaint online, it is important to document as much of the information as possible regarding the customer's complaint, such as the customer's name, the product/service that was flagged in the complaint, date, and the contents of the complaint.
When a company receives a complaint, performing a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) allows them to identify the source of the issue. Companies can utilize a number of different RCA tools to assist with the resolution of the complaint, e.g., Five Whys, Fishbone Diagram, Failure Mode & Effect Analysis - FMEA, so that they can provide appropriate solutions when resolving the complaint. Resolving the root cause of the issue will prevent similar complaints from being filed in the future.
After identifying the root cause, the next step is to plan how to resolve the customers’ complaint. At this stage, service recovery involves determining the corrective actions necessary to fix the problem while also developing a communication strategy to keep the customer informed throughout the process.
Most complaints are handled by multiple teams, making it critical to designate roles and responsibilities and coordinate between groups to resolve the complaint as effectively and expediently as possible.
