Every business has to deal with customer complaints, especially if you own a customer-centric business.
Sometimes, a product cannot meet the buyer’s expectations, or something may go wrong, resulting in a complaint. However, it’s not something that you need to worry about for your businesses.
In fact, customer complaints are great opportunities to showcase your excellent customer service and succeed over a dissatisfied customer.
Handling customer complaints is essential for your business to increase customer retention, maintain good relationships with your target audience, and strengthen brand reputation.
If you want to thrive your business in the long run, you have to handle customers’ complaints effectively.
In this guide, we’ll discuss the importance of handling customer complaints and useful tips to handle them.
Why is it important to handle customer complaints carefully?
Businesses have to handle customer complaints properly, as customers are the stepping stone to growing your business.
Buyers have a direct impact on your business, whether it thrives or fails, as they are the ones purchasing your product. This statement is especially true when you are competing in a highly competitive market.
Customer often complains when the brand’s product hasn’t met their specific expectations. Hence, by actively listening to their complaints you can improve your product in such a way that it meets customer’s expectations.
It means handling customer complaints helps in the modification of products and services that meet market demand.
If you cannot address their problem effectively, it may lead them to write negative feedback on social media. Once it is posted online, it can be seen by millions of potential customers, which can affect your business reputation.
Therefore, businesses have to address their complaints and rectify the situation. If you provide an effective solution for customers, it helps to increase customer retention and build customer relationships.
Additionally, positive feedback from customers can protect your brand reputation and foster customer loyalty.
8 Useful tips for handling Customer Complaints
Most customer support teams struggle to resolve customer complaints effectively.
Therefore, it’s crucial for a business to train and provide the necessary tools for its customer service team to handle the complaints and provide a better solution.
These are the useful tips below that businesses can follow to handle angry customer calls in call centers:
1. Listen to your customer complaints
When a customer complains, it means that they come across an issue while using your product or services. If you ignore or fail to understand their complaints, it can directly affect their experience with your company.
Therefore, a business’s customer support team must listen to and understand the customers’ complaints to offer an effective solution.
2. Show empathy towards the customers
Empathy means stepping into the customer’s perspective and analyzing a situation from their side. It plays a key role in resolving the customer’s problem.
In addition, it helps to understand what the exact customer’s concern is and what might be the action to resolve it. It is one of the ways to treat customers professionally.
Also, relating to the customer’s concern makes them feel like you genuinely understand their frustration, which helps calm everyone down and work toward a solution.
3. Apologize sincerely to your customers
If you didn’t deliver a product or service as per their expectations or made a mistake, unpretentiously, you must apologize to the customers.
An apology from your brand reps can make a huge difference when handling unhappy or unsatisfied clients. This can help them to calm down instantly and explain their concern in more detail.
Furthermore, it helps you to move closer to finding a solution for prospects and defuse the situation.
4. Investigate the issue of customers
Another tip for handling customer complaints is investing in the root cause of issues. To find out the root cause, you can ask relevant questions to customers once you have listened to their complaints to understand their situation completely.
Once you gain more information, it is easier for you to find a more suitable solution for their concern. In addition, asking relevant questions helps you to provide excellent customer service.
5. Solved the issues quickly
Customer representatives have to be responsive and act instantly to deal with the customer’s concerns. Customers don’t want to wait days or more to explain their situation and find a solution.
Keeping them on hold drives them more frustrated, which makes the situation worse. Rather, prepare the customer service team with guidelines on go-to solutions for common customer concerns.
6. Follow-up the customers
Once you provide a solution for customers, following up is one of the important factors to engage with the audience. You can contact them to ask if their problem is solved or not.
It indicates that you genuinely want to make them feel special and care about the problem, which leads to a positive experience for consumers.
At this point, if the customer is happy, there’s a high probability that they will return to purchase your products or services.
7. Train your team
When it comes to addressing customer support, efficient agent training plays a crucial role. Businesses have to make sure that the customer service team fully understands their products and services.
Also, they need to equip their team (agents) with the right knowledge and capabilities of the phone system they use. All of that may include training on using management and tracking features of a phone system for customer support to make the most out of it, just to be more efficient and more customer-centric when it comes to service delivery.
8. Learn from feedback
Feedback, either positive or negative is essential for every business. Feedback helps businesses learn about what customers liked and what they disliked after using their products or services.
See 3 reasons capturing customer feedback is important.
This way they can learn more about their product’s issues, where they are lacking, and areas that need improvement. To learn more about your product problems, you can conduct a survey to target audience.
Conclusion
Sometimes a brand product cannot meet the customer’s expectations resulting in a complaint. It is true that a complaint from a customer can be viewed as an opportunity to improve goods or services, but on the other hand, it can negatively affect your brand’s image in the long run.
Therefore, every business either small or large must work to reduce customer complaints by offering effective solutions to customers’ concerns.
To handle customer complaints more effectively, companies’ customer reps must listen to their complaints, show empathy towards prospects, and investigate the issues of customers in detail.
Every business has to resolve its customer complaints efficaciously to maximize the number of customers retention. Better customer service can increase the number of customers by word-of-mouth marketing.
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FAQS
1. What is good customer service?
Good customer service means meeting customer expectations and going further to exceed them. It includes being responsive, quick, personalized, and empathetic in interactions with customers. Profits and brand recognition increase with good customer service.
2. What are the four major types of complaints?
Customers can complain about a lot of things, such as products or services, delivery, and much more.
Here are four major types of complaints:
- Product or service: Customers can submit their complaints if they have a problem with products or services. It includes the quality of the product, whether it arrived broken, or the bad experience with customer service.
- Wait time: This type of complaint occurs when a customer calls a company and experiences a long hold time. So, you need to apologize for making them wait and let them know you understand their time is valuable.
- Delivery: Delivery complaints are made when it may take time to deliver your products or a company changes the expected delivery date of the product. When it happens, you can track the details of the package and assure customers that it’s on the way.
- Personnel: This complaint occurs when a customer encounters a bad interaction with an employee in your company. It involves the behavior or competence of staff or customer service representatives.
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How do you get zero customer complaints?
It’s impossible for companies to get zero customer complaints. However, you can reduce the complaints by following some strategies.
Here are some useful tips to reduce customer complaints:
- Prioritize customer satisfaction: Businesses can collect potential customers’ data to provide the exact goods and services. If the product meets the customers’ expectations, it will satisfy them, which reduces complaints about products and services.
- Spot the root cause of every issue: Companies need to identify the underlying reasons for customer complaints and take further steps to stop them from recurring.
- Anticipating and responding to complaints: Before the potential issues become complaints, companies should proactively identify them. Then, you can resolve them so the customer doesn’t have to experience the problem.
- Make complaint resolution a top priority: To reduce customer complaints, companies have to set clear goals for efficient complaint handling. Further, you have to categorize issues by urgency, assuming the team resolves the critical matter first.
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Why do customers complain?
A customer often complains about products and services when their expectation isn’t met or has a negative experience with staff or customer service representatives.
Further, they also complain when they have to wait for a long time to receive their package. There are several things that can affect customers’ expectations.
Complaints can be simply reduced by offering a good quality product and excellent customer service.
