Learning how to handle customer complaints is essential for any successful business. For this reason, complaints should be seen as opportunities to improve business offers and satisfy customers.
According to a survey conducted by Huffpost, 67% of consumers consider a negative brand experience as a good reason to look for another company. Therefore, listening to complaints and solving problems are critical attitudes to avoid negative impacts on business and maintain close relationships with customers.
This article provides 5 steps that will help you manage complaints and ensure good relationship with your audience.
- Use active listening and empathy
The first step is to listen to what the customer has to say. Active listening shows your company is interested in the consumer’s story and motivates customers to continue expressing their opinions about the services they receive.
Not interrupting the customer and not raising doubts about his/her speech are also important to help promote a healthy relationship with the customer. By creating a welcoming atmosphere, people feel more comfortable to speak up.
And don’t forget to be empathetic with customers. Putting yourself in their shoes will help you understand their complaints and see how they feel.
- Seek supporting facts
Use real data to support facts. Seek facts that are related to the complaints submitted by customers. In these cases, empathy and supportive language will make all the difference when requesting evidence of the complaint.
You can also look for internal data that support the veracity of the complaints, allowing your company to adopt fast actions or seek better solutions.
- Recognize the problem
Customers should also know that your company recognizes its faults. An apology can resolve conflicts and shows your company is interested in finding a solution.
Also, recognizing a problem allows a company to take the necessary measures to avoid it in the future. Checking internal records also helps mobilize the team so that such problem won’t become frequent.
- Offer a solution
When a customer submits a complaint, the company is expected to take an action and resolve the problem. For this reason, offering a solution also means meeting consumer expectations.
Having a problem-solving plan in place will help you find a viable solution faster, allowing an effective complaint management system in which the company promptly responds to customers.
As part of this plan, meetings with the sales team and other business departments should be held to discuss this subject. Supporting data, such as those of more frequent complaints from customers, will help you outline a process to solve a problem even before a complaint is submitted. Also, a strategy may be developed to resolve new issues faster.
- Monitor it closely
Monitor the process closely to ensure the needs of a customer have been met and the complaints have been resolved. Conducting a satisfaction survey after the contact will help collect data regarding your customer service.
In addition, carefully monitoring every customer request is a strategy to prevent new problems. As a result, the customer service becomes more attentive and faster, favoring both the company and its customers.
The best way to handle customer complaints is to avoid them as much as possible. For this reason, the best strategy is to have a tool that centralizes all tickets and complaints, and that:
- manages different customer service channels;
- has a trained team;
- uses proper management tools.
Milvus can offer you all these resources as it helps you solve customer problems and optimizes your routine processes. Visit Milvus website and learn more about this solution!
In addition to handling customer complaints, Milvus tool helps you optimize your work processes. This way, your customer relationship will improve, representing a positive aspect for your company.
Did you like the steps above? So, follow Milvus on its social media pages on Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube!
