Customers will return to companies that resolve a complaint in their favour 70% of the time.
82% of people stopped buying from a business after facing poor customer service.
31% of people will share their negative experiences online. Customer complaints spread like wildfire on social media and can end up costing companies hundreds of transactions.
Mistakes happen in every business. Sooner or later, a customer will complain, and apologising will not be enough. Luckily, there are ways to handle customer complaints like a true professional.
But before you move to the tips, memorise this:
Customer complaints are blessings in disguise
Sure, they are uncomfortable, but they are telling you what you need to do to improve your company. Here is how to turn customer complaints into a positive customer experience:
- Stay calm and apologise Don’t let a customer’s negative experience affect you. Stay in control and show empathy for their disappointment. You can apologise by saying something like: “I am sorry you had to deal with this. Let me find a way to make it up to you,” or “I am sorry you weren’t satisfied with our service. I will shortly see what happened.”
- Listen to your customerTry to understand the root cause of the complaint. In the most cases, an upset customer just wants someone to understand his or her situation. If you listen actively, you also have a chance to create a smarter resolution strategy. According to a report, customers appreciate the quality of a response more than the speed of the response. Don’t respond until you go through the full complaint.
- Follow-up and reward feedbackFollow-up with customers to ensure they were happy with your solution. You can do this through a phone call or an email. Ask your customers how your company handled the complaint. This a great way to turn them into loyal customers. The reward can be a bonus or a discount. It really makes your company look good.
- Use some of these customer support tools!Organising and getting a grip on complaints can be difficult. If customer complaints come in a large quantity, you may not be able to respond quickly. This is why you need customer complaint tools that will make sure everyone gets a timely and quality response. Here is a list of customer complaint tools that will make your life easier.
1. Grasshopper
Grasshopper is a virtual phone system for handling customer complaints via phone. It is also a fantastic way to humanise complaint handling process. With this tool, you can receive and make calls from Skype or personal cell phone. Also, you can set up auto answers for common complaints with the extensions supported by Grasshopper.
Grasshopper even has an SMS feature that can be used to answer complaints via personalised text messages.
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a customer complaint tool that turns complaints into tickets. Users can respond to complaints and keep tabs on their progress on any channel. Freshdesk helps you prioritise, categorise and assign complaints to staffers.
Also, users can see insightful reports on the biggest complaint areas.
3. Sparkcentral
Sparkcentral is an ideal software for impatient customers. Customers increasingly turn to social media to make complaints. They also expect their complaints to be resolved quickly.
Sparkcentral has an engagement dashboard to improve response times to the complaints. Users can also see analytics and report portal that allows tracking productivity and sharing information to resolve complaints as a team.
4. Happy Fox
HappyFox is a cloud-hosted software. It enables you to track customer complaints across multiple channels like social media, chat, phone and email in a central support ticket system. HappyFox has a special ticketing system, with features to split individual issues into separate tickets.
The software features CRM integration as well, that helps to pull a customer’s information such as demography, contact and other business data.
5. Help Scout
Help Scout provides detailed reports with every metric that is needed to resolve a complaint. Users can drill down to interaction-level specifics to give useful feedback without much effort.
Help Scout supports over 40 integrations, which means you can pull in customer activity from other services in a few seconds.
Are you familiar with some of these tools? Would you ever use some of them in your business? Why not share your experiences and practices with other business professionals at the UK Digital Experience Awards 2016!
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