You know how important customers are to your business, which is why you work hard to give them the best customer experience possible. But even with the best customer service, you may still receive negative customer feedback.
Having unhappy customers isn’t the end of the world, however. By establishing complaint guidelines and taking certain steps, you can protect your relationships with dissatisfied or difficult customers. In fact, you may even turn a negative experience into a positive one.
Whether you’re a business owner or a skilled customer service representative, these are things you’ll need to know about managing customer needs and effectively dealing with upset customers.
How to handle customer service complaints
A customer complaint means something isn’t connecting between the customer’s expectations and what your business has delivered. But how do you know what that disconnect is, and how can you solve it?
In addition to developing the right customer service skills, consistently following a specific set of steps can help you handle customer complaints effectively. Consider this recommended process flow:
- Acknowledge the problem
- Ask questions for clarification
- Identify the type of customer
- Provide a fast solution
- Log the issue
- Follow up with your customer
- Exceed expectations with your post-complaint actions
1. Acknowledge the problem
When a customer reaches out with a complaint, let them know you understand the problem and you’re working to address it. You’re not necessarily agreeing with what they’re saying—you’re just showing you can empathize with them and you’re practicing active listening. For example, you might say something like, “I’m sorry you’re experiencing issues with…” and follow these introductory words with their specific complaint.
Offering a sincere apology can even benefit your organization. One research study found that customer satisfaction goes from 43% to 60% when businesses use a combination of monetary relief and an apology. This can even inspire customers to withdraw negative reviews.
Consider for a moment that your business accidentally ships the wrong product to a customer. After receiving the customer’s complaint, your service rep might say, “I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience caused by receiving the wrong product. I’m going to fix that for you.”
2. Ask questions for clarification
When it comes to customer complaints, it’s important to have a thorough understanding of the situation. If you have any questions about what went wrong or what the customer is looking for, take the time to ask for clarification before moving forward, such as, “Can you expand on…?” or “Do you mind providing an example?” If you misunderstand something and don’t appropriately address the customer’s problem, you may prolong their frustration and lead them to believe you don’t care about them and their issue.
For example, let’s say a customer complains that a clothing item they ordered doesn’t fit as described. It’s a good idea to confirm whether they want to return the item for a refund or would like to exchange it for a different size.
If this customer has indicated they’d like to be contacted through email, you can send them a quick message outlining the problem and potential solutions, asking them which one they’d like to pursue. This helps ensure that the solution you provide aligns with customer expectations.
3. Identify the type of customer
When fielding complaints from customers, you may find that aligning your customers with a few key categories is useful. Knowing the type of customer you’re communicating with can help you provide them with the most effective solutions.
Some types of customers you might encounter include:
- Those inclined to complain loudly: The trick is to reply calmly, acknowledging the problem and what your business plans to do about it. Sometimes the best thing you can do is to simply avoid confrontation.
- Those who feel entitled to receive something: This type of complainer may be looking to find something wrong with your solution so they can get something for free. In response, it might be best to be objective and keep questions open-ended, like, “What can I do to make it right for you?”
- Your VIPs: These customers pay a premium for your services and want customer support that reflects their status. So, you’ll want to focus on finding solutions and going the extra mile to keep them happy without wasting time giving excuses.
- Those who won’t complain directly but will just stop buying from you: These customers are some of the most common. One study indicates that only 1 in 26 customers will actually voice their complaints to you. So, it’s important to regularly initiate the conversation with customers to gauge their satisfaction and stay plugged into social media to listen for complaints. Unearthing this hidden dissatisfaction may be your only chance to make the situation right and maintain their business.
Knowing the type of customer you’re dealing with can help ensure your response is the right one. For example, let’s say your landscaping business receives a call from an angry customer who claims one of your company vehicles ran over a shrub.
This customer has used your landscaping business for years and often hires you to prepare their yard for large, formal gatherings, making them a VIP customer for the business. While good customer service calls for you to fix the problem as soon as possible, you’ll want to make a visible extra effort for this customer. This might include sending workers over within the next few hours to replace the bush and giving the customer a gift card for future services.
4. Provide fast solutions
When a customer reaches out to your support team, they don’t want to get passed from person to person or wait a long time to have their issue addressed. Make sure your customer support team is empowered to manage most issues themselves.
This allows a rep to pick up the conversation with a frustrated customer and offer fixes naturally. This can result in the customer feeling that their issue was taken seriously and addressed immediately. The customer also doesn’t have to wait for the rep to get approval from others or experience other potential delays. This can help boost the customer’s confidence in your organization in the long term.
Consider a call that comes into your cybersecurity company. The customer signed up for an auto-pay plan when their contract expired. Somehow, though, they were charged twice. If your customer support rep can automatically stop the second payment and get the customer a refund immediately—while apologizing for the mistake—the customer is more likely to be satisfied with the solution than if your rep has to take time to seek approval from the billing department before issuing the refund.
5. Log the issue
As important as it is to solve problems for individual customers, make sure that you also monitor the complaints broadly to help identify patterns that you need to address. If customers are regularly complaining about how long it takes for products to ship, for example, you might want to look into your shipping practices to see how you can improve the situation.
The only way for you to find these types of patterns, though, is to log each complaint that comes to you. A customer complaint management system like Zoho Desk, Zendesk, and Freshdesk can help. With your software, record the complaint and categorize it so you can easily find it and compare it to others in the future.
6. Follow up with your customer
To make sure customers know you care about their experiences, make sure to follow up with them to see if the solutions meet their expectations. This follow-up doesn’t have to be complicated—you might just send the customer a survey or a quick email asking them if you’ve resolved the issue and how they’d rank the experience of working with your support team.
Whether you plan to follow up using an email template, phone call script, or chatbot prompt, try to zero in on their experience with your customer service reps and their satisfaction with the solution. This should help you ask the right questions, such as:
- How would they rate their experience with the support team?
- How would they rate the solution they received?
- What can the business do better next time?
7. Exceed expectations with your post-complaint actions
Even after you finish resolving the customer’s complaint, take it a step further and exceed their expectations. This can help shift their perception of the situation from negative to positive and increase the chances of that customer returning.
Exceeding the expectations of your customers can come in the form of paying close attention to details and genuinely showing your consideration for their experience. For example, sending a thank-you note to the customer for allowing you to correct the problem can be a great place to start. You can also offer them some type of bonus, such as a gift card, a coupon, or the chance to try out new products.
The importance of handling your customer’s complaint the right way
Customer expectations have changed over the years. With the rise of social media and business review sites and forums, customers have come to expect immediate responses from the companies they buy from. They also expect businesses to correct any issues as soon as they’re made aware of them.
Businesses are run by humans, and humans do sometimes make mistakes: A product order size gets entered incorrectly, a package gets delayed, a sales professional misunderstands something, or a flaw in a product or service leaves customers looking for a solution.
Customers do realize that these mistakes can happen. It’s the actions you and your customer support team take afterward to correct that mistake that can have a big impact on your reputation and how customers perceive your company.
Establishing customer complaint guidelines and policies
To help you navigate customer complaints and the initiatives taken to resolve them, establish common guidelines and policies. These can empower your customer service team to know how to behave when faced with different problems and save time by delivering efficient support.
Consider adopting these three main goals when establishing good complaint guidelines:
- Line up your customer service team and workflow
- Use feedback to improve customer experiences
- Convert your dissatisfied customer into a loyal one
Line up your customer service team and workflow
Prioritize establishing a workflow with your customer service team that can improve the customer experience. To accomplish this, keep a few key elements in mind:
- Make sure each complaint that arrives has a designated person in charge of getting it resolved within the specified time frame. You don’t want any customer’s frustration being forgotten or ignored.
- Establish a response time for your complaints. This should include how quickly you expect to establish contact with the customer and clarify the issue as well as how long you expect fully resolving the issue to take.
- Outline the behaviors and types of responses expected from your customer service team throughout their interactions with the customer.
- Make sure you keep complaints open internally so your team can examine what went wrong to cause the issue in the first place. Keep records of issues, look for patterns, and find ways to improve your processes so customers don’t face the same issues repeatedly.
Use feedback to improve customer experiences
Finally, use the feedback you receive from customers to improve their experience every step of the way. For example, if you regularly receive complaints about the clothing you sell not fitting as expected, reevaluate how you size your items and how you help customers determine their size. If customers often say delivery times are slow, review how you set expectations during checkout to be sure delivery targets are achievable. See if you can find ways to improve shipping times to better align with customer desires.
Making adjustments to provide better service to your valued customers will do more than just help reduce the complaints you receive from them. You’ll also likely cut down on the number of dissatisfied customers who leave your business without ever even telling you.
Convert your dissatisfied customer into a loyal one
Understanding how to rectify problems and exceeding expectations is key to building a strong and loyal customer base. This should be your ultimate goal for every customer interaction.
However, sometimes converting dissatisfied customers into loyal ones isn’t possible. Even if you do fix the problem and then follow up, some customers just don’t want to stick around.
In these situations, it’s good to go over the training and experience with your customer service reps and use the best practices listed in this article to help increase the chances of turning dissatisfied customers into loyal ones.
Step up your customer service experience
At some point, every company faces customers who feel dissatisfied with their business. Misunderstandings and mistakes happen. Learning how to handle complaints properly, though, can help boost your career if you’re a customer service rep or your reputation if you’re a business.
