Articles, thoughts and guides on improving customer complaints to make them a learning tool for business and human-centred for customers.
Need to write a complaint procedure? Here’s some ideas, tips and approaches to create one that’s customer-centric and human-centred. We get to see a fair few complaint procedures in our work. The way you treat your customers when things go wrong isn’t just the difference between keeping them or losing them, it has a huge …
In the 1980s, poet Ted Hughes noticed that the children’s poems he was judging as part of a competition were getting longer. Some were running to nearly 100 pages. Although they were were fluent and often creative, Hughes described them as ‘strangely boring’. Rather than concentrated, condensed thought, they felt diluted and thin. Just because …
I’m beginning to believe that organisations have forgotten how to say sorry; not just on a person to person level, but corporately. Take Tesco’s latest foray into public apology… It seems that some of this year’s Christmas turkeys weren’t quite up to scratch, with customers complaining they were sold “rancid, rotten” birds. The social media …
Handling customer complaints can be tough. Here are nine proven techniques to make customer complaints easier to handle and reduce the chance of escalation or negative feedback. Practical ways to make handling customer complaints easier Everyone gets complaints. Almost no-one likes them. That’s because they’re a complicated blend of the rational (“this thing you sold me doesn’t work!”) and …
Nine practical ways to handle customer complaints. Better. Read More »
Tried and tested ways to really annoy customers We’ve put together the top 10 ways that businesses can really annoy their customers through the way they communicate with them. Follow these simple steps to alienate and irritate even the most loyal of customers. Top ten ways to really annoy your customers from Rubuss
Giving customer bad news is never easy, but there a simple ways to ease the blow… How to avoid common mistakes when handling customer complaints. Using HP Sauce as an example, we look at how businesses can avoid common mistakes in their customer complaint handling – and produce more effective complaint responses in the process. Customer …
Recently we talked about how important emotion is in handling complaints. As an example, we used HP Sauce’s replies to customers after a recent change to their recipe. Since then we’ve had some Twitter DMs and tweets asking what we would have done. In fact, we’d only start looking at a customer reply when we’d …
Bottling it up – playing straight with customer complaints Read More »
How you write to complaining customers determines the response you get back. A little while ago, HP Sauce changed their recipe. Even though the change was tiny, people thought they could taste the difference. It caused a storm of customer complaints, articles in the UK press, on the radio and TV. Twitter and Facebook agreed, …
HP Sauce and how to make complaint responses better Read More »
