Customer Complaints Process

How does it feel for a customer to complain? Making sure your complaint process doesn’t make things worse.

A complaints process should be looked at like any other customer journey. Start with what really matters to customers and build an experience that reflects it. We can help you develop and implement a customer-friendly process that’s focused on timely resolution.

Routes to complaint

Making complaints easy for customers

It’s likely complaints will come from a variety of sources. When looking at your process it’s important to explore each of these channels to see how each performs. Social is becoming a increasingly prevalent Does is feels the same for a customer however they complain? How do you manage different channels so they

Putting things right

Getting things fixed as quickly as possible

At the heart of a complaint process is how quickly and effectively you can put things right for customers. This means your process needs to be flexible enough to quickly diagnose the root cause and channel the issue to the right department or team.

Making process customer-centric

How customer-friendly is your complaint process?

It’s perhaps obvious to say but your process should be driven by the customer’s complaint journey – not the other way around. Starting with an internal perspective can often exacerbate the issues customers are contacting you about in the first place. “Experience drives process” is a useful first step when reviewing a process to make sure every decision is sanity checked against they kind of experience that would give to customers.

The power of listening

Giving customers the space to tell their story

You might be missing something important if your complaint process doesn’t allow time for customers to be listened to. Being listened to (and heard) is often an important part of the emotional expectations customers have when complaining. Making it a visible and overt part of your process means it doesn’t get missed or

Managing customer expectations

A customer complaint process that manages expectations

How often do customers want to be updated? How do they like to be communicated with? How many times do they need to give you the same information? Do they appreciate a single owner of their problem? These are all important variables when you’re looking at how your process fits with customer expectations. What would you expect as a customer?

What information would you want to know early on? How long would you expect to wait for an acknowledgement? Measuring your process against these expectations means you can avoid common problems where there’s a disjoint between what customers expect and what your process creates.

Feedback

Letting customers know they’ve been heard

It’s also worth considering how you let customers know when something’s changes because of their complaint. It’s often overlooked but customers value being listened to and appreciate being updated if their feedback has influenced change. Aside from this it’s important to think about “closing the loop” once something’s been resolved.