For organizations needing to improve their customer service, gathering and reviewing customer complaints is the quickest way to draft an action list. Consulting customer service staff is also essential.
For all organizations, customer complaints and feedback from customer-facing staff will keep you constantly aware of areas to improve to keep up with changing markets needs and expectations.
Treat complaints about service failures like precious gems, because they are that valuable. Organizations pay huge fees to researchers and survey companies to discover their weaknesses, whereas complaints effectively provide the same data for free. Moreover, each service failure complaint is a very specific prompt to improve a process or policy or someone's training somewhere. Wasting or losing these gems is daft.
So welcome and encourage complaints, don't fear or hide from them, or pretend you are fantastic because you (make sure that you) don't get any complaints.
Make it as easy for people to complain as to buy. There's a challenge for you..
Here are some common mistakes that organizations make about customer service and complaints handling in particular:
don't..
- Make it difficult for people to complain, e.g., long-winded contact method on your website.
- Make it difficult for customer service staff to give feedback and to influence customer service systems and policies.
- Treat the customer service function like a battery hen farm.
- Fail to have a complaints handling process which you have tested and had approved by complaining customers.
- Fail to appoint anyone responsible for managing complaints handling.
- Fail to inform staff about the value of complaints and the need to encourage and respond to them.
- Refuse to escalate complaints and problems, or make escalation to a higher level difficult.
- Refuse to give customers the names of senior managers and executives and their contact details.
- Fail to put free or local-rate customer services phone numbers on your invoices and website.
- Fail to show clearly and make available your head office contact details.
- Fail to expose senior managers and executives to complaining customers.
- Pretend to have a customer service department but merely outsource a basic message-taking service.
- Offer an automated telephone menu system which excludes appropriate and easy options to complain.
- Design punitive termination penalties for customers wishing to cancel their contracts and instruct your customer service staff to use such threats freely and forcefully.
instead do..
Check your culture. This comes from the top and pervades everything. So this is ultimately for the CEO or the shareholders to start changing if it's not right.
There is little point in implementing a wonderfully robust and logical customer service code of practice if your culture can't support it.
So this section is really all about culture and particularly how you treat staff ans customers. All the rest is relatively easy and mechanical for any decent modern management team, because aside from culture, customer service relies on sensible service and pricing strategies and the processes to sell and deliver then and to sort out problems. What makes the real difference is how you involve and treat people within these processes. Which all comes back to culture.
The culture must be one of really honestly respecting and valuing staff and customers. When you have this culture the human element gets to work: relationships and communications work, problems are solved, internally and externally people focus on looking after colleagues and customers, rather than merely working systems, executing processes and adhering to policies. The organisation has life - becomes organic - rather than operating as an inflexible machine or a set of instructions.
In the context of customer service, a good indication of culture is how easy it is to complain. In lots of big organizations it's actually very difficult to complain, and even more difficult to complain and be taken seriously.
You must make it easy for people - customers and staff - to contact you and complain, by email, post and especially by phone, and to every level in your organization - especially to the CEO.
Executives who never see complaints are deluding themselves. On the pretext of protecting their precious executive time, countless senior managers and executives are oblivious of what is happening in their business. Worse still this ostrich-like example teaches all managers that avoiding complaints is the way to manage customers, which as a customer service strategy is what might technically be referred to as a load of bollocks. Ask your customers what they think about senior managers and executives hiding from complaints and most people will use far stronger terms than that.
Executives who hide from complaints also tend to develop a culture among managers and all staff that is scared of complaints, which naturally causes people to cover up complaints and to distort complaints and failure statistics even when asked to report on them.
Megalomaniac, autocratic and egocentric leaders are particularly prone to this syndrome, in which customer satisfaction information is obscured and massaged so that the entire senior management moves from denial to blissful ignorance, while the customer service staff continue to act as a super-absorbent firewall, until one day - when the customer churn is nudging 25% - the board finally realises that they do indeed have a problem, and that the market and the competition and the customers - and the customer service staff - are not to blame for it. The problem is the leadership: the culture, the systems, the policies, the strategies - out of step with what the customers need and expect.
Interestingly this stems from the insecurity which drives certain traditional leadership styles and cultures, in which criticism is seen as a threat rather than a useful reflective and improvement aid. If you are one of these leaders please go get some therapy before you do any more harm to your staff and customers. Arrogance and bluster are not effective behaviours by which to run a proper business in the 21st century, let alone to encourage and inspire employees and managers to strive for customer service excellence.
Instead expose yourself to all the complaints you can find. Remember - you would normally pay a researcher lots of money for this information. And each complaint gives you the chance to solve a customer's problem, which often means that you then get to keep that customer for life.
To do this you will need to check that your complaint handling process works for your most awkward customers and for your most passive customers. This will turn many of your most awkward customers into your best customers, and some of your most passive customers into awkward customers, but you will now be receiving complaints, which if you were not seeing any before is a major advance.
With all these new complaints you will need some expert input and ideas about how to improve things. Lucky for you, your employees are the world's best experts at improving your services to your customers, so it makes sense to ask for their help.
Obviously ensure your customers' complaints are resolved along the way, and equally importantly, help the organization to develop the capability (and culture) to identify the causes of problems and to rectify the root causes, to prevent the problems happening again.
It's a lot simple rwhen you get the culture right. Open all the communications. Encourage complaints. Fix the problems and the systems. Utilise your people to contribute to the whole process.
Empower and encourage your customer service staff to give feedback about the systems and policies within which you expect them to work and deliver great customer service. Train and develop and nurture and love your customer service staff - they are almost certainly your most under-valued and under-utilized asset. They will perform as you treat them. If you treat customer service staff like battery hens don't expect them to take much of an interest in your organization.
Think creatively about the emphasis and status you give to the customer service role. Customer service staff are widely under-valued and under-utilised. They are by nature extremely helpful and loyal people, capable of doing a lot more for you than they are typically empowered to do. So empower them, and you will see significant improvements in customer satisfaction, because the experts will be taking care of it for you.
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