Complaints

Articles, thoughts and guides on improving customer complaints to make them a learning tool for business and human-centred for customers.

Laptops prevent you from retaining information as well as writing by hand

Why your laptop is stopping you thinking

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 …

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Better complaint handling

Nine practical ways to handle customer complaints. Better.

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 …

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How to annoy customers

SlideShare: Top 10 ways to really annoy customers

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

Playing it straight with customer complaints

Bottling it up – playing straight with customer complaints

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 …

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Good news about bad news

HP Sauce and how to make complaint responses better

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, …

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