How To Improve Customer Service By Handing Complaints
Learning how to deal with complaints in an effective and efficient manner is vital to improving customer service.
Failing to handle complaints in a professional fashion can seriously damage a business both financially and in terms of reputation because firms have been fined millions by industry regulators for their customer service failings.
By introducing improvements to organisational processes, companies can change the way they currently operate in order to develop the way they cope with complaints and ultimately enhance business performance.
The first and most obvious way to deal with customer grievances is to create a structured complaint-handling process which is a practice that is surprisingly often ignored by businesses.
An effective complaint-handling process will enable a business to collect and record complaints to note any patterns that may arise and to measure how the grievance was dealt with and by whom.
Once a business receives a complaint it is important to assign it a priority level because not all grievances are the same and each one needs a response which is appropriate to the severity of the claim.
Businesses can be pre-empted complaints by keeping customers informed of any problems via their preferred method of communication whether it is phone, email or a social media announcement.
Effectively handling criticism can help an organisation improve businesses performance by changing their processes based on their customer's perspective so it is important that firms make it easy for people to complain.
Allowing people to complain through their preferred channel will enable a business to collect criticism from the widest possible range of customers and this will give a more realistic analysis of their processes.
Customers are becoming more sophisticated so it is now important to monitor social media channels in order to review both positive and negative comments which can affect a business.
Comments published on social media can be viewed by a large audience so businesses must be able to react quickly to any criticism so that any issues are resolved in an appropriate fashion.
Criticism is only useful to a business if they learn from the points raised so fixing processes, retraining staff and eliminating faults should all be potentially remedies to highlighted problems.
Performance improvement consulting experts can help businesses enhance performance and customer service through the redesigning of organisational processes.
These business consultants are adept at applying systems thinking so that organisations can view their processes from the customer's perspective.