Responding to Customer Complaints | 10 Steps to handle angry customers

Responding to Customer Complaints is always difficult and tricky. Every business is based on some clients and customers, and the customers are sometimes very difficult to handle. Especially when customers are not satisfied with your product or services.

Customer complaints become even more difficult when an angry customer is complaining. Today the businesses are changed from traditional customer approach to modern approaches where customer is considered as a King. Why? because of what customer want is the priority of business to produce.

The goals of products and services are not just to meet customer expectations rather to provide valued products and services to exceed customer expectations. Now businesses are more focused to customer demand. So that’s why it is very necessary to keep your customers more comfortable to use your product and service.

Customer relations is an art of dealing with customers. Many companies especially SMEs usually don’t have an expert level staff to deal with customer complaints. So the problems may arise resulting in many conflicts where company may suffer more than customer.

That is why every employee who is in contact with customers or customer relation officers must be trained enough to cope any challenging environment. It is not very simple for everyone to do this job because it certainly suit more to those people who are made for this in their nature. But it doesn’t mean you can’t do that. Yes you can do that if you follow these 10 simple steps.

Responding to Customer Complaints | 10 Steps to deal with customer complaints –

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Step 1- Stay Cool and Calm

Number one principle “Responding to Customer Complaints” is, you have to stay cool and calm while dealing with angry customers. I know its quite difficult but imagine the importance of this angry customer, he/she can provide unimaginable benefits to company because of genuine feedback though which your company can improve the gap identified by this customer.

So value these types of customers and keep your full control on nerves. Customers have right to express their feelings about your product or services.

Step 2- Be Attentive and Listen well

The second principle “Responding to Customer Complaints” is to be attentive to your customer and listen well what is actually customer is complaining for ? So that your customer should realized that he/she has been attended properly and he/she has been valued. Quite often it happens that customer relation officer listen the complaint casually because of the fact that he/she is getting the same complaint or related to that complaint regularly. But seriously it is annoying to customers. Keep in mind every new customer doesn’t know it and even doesn’t care about it. So be ready to face a new challenge every time but in welcoming manner.

Step 3- Ask and Clarify

The problem with customer relation officers is, most of the time, they hurry in responding the customer complaints without scraping the actual reason. In this profession understanding what customer is complaining for, is very important.

Ask if you couldn’t understand the customer complaint and clarify what he/she wants actually ? It’s more important to save time clarifying the things before rather than it may waste more time of both company and customer afterwards.

Step 4- Make Short Notes

Sometimes problems are too many to remember, so it’s better to make short notes of what are customer complaints. It is very effective way to keep you updated about things, it also gains some confidence of customer in a way that now problem will be resolved, if written down.

Step 5- Acknowledge the Problem and Apologize

Responding to Customer Complaints, it’s not bad to apologize while customer is complaining. If the customer is asking for some problem exists in a product or service, acknowledge the customer is saying right and we apologize for it.

Step 6- Get all the Facts

Now look into the matter of complaint deeply and get all the facts- check the complaint is genuinely about what ? – details of complaints. It would be better to note down the findings and facts.

Step 7- Quickly Find the Solutions

Then quickly look with the eye of your company to find the possible solutions- to solve the complaint at your best. There would be some listed or provided solutions by the company for each type of complaint. Go through all the given solutions and segregate the related solutions for the complaint type.

Step 8- Offer Best Possible Solution

After fetching many solutions, choose the best one and offer to customer. Communicate with customer in a gentle way and agree on one promised solution.

Step 9- Follow up with the Customer

Big companies are big because of their customers and the customers are loyal to those companies who really care for their customers. For example, if a cellular company makes a follow up call to its customer who made complaint to company- asking the feedback of customer what he/she feels about the product or service now.

So remain in touch with your customer and get some feedback. Follow up sometimes make customer genuinely loyal to company because customer feels, company values me.

Step 10- Exceed Customer Expectations

If you exceed your customer expectation, then definitely it will make your customer happy. For example, giving free bag to customer when they purchase new Lap Top, is exceeding the customer expectations.

Like wise if customer complains for some defects in a product, and not only you resolve that complaint but also provide customer an additional value proposition- it will exceeds the customer expectation. Exceeding customer expectation is a cost to company but it makes your customer more loyal to your company.

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Summary — Responding to Customer Complaints

In every business there remains the need of some improvements. While the customers complaints are one of the best feedback for improving the gaps in your business. So it all depends on how you are Responding to Customer Complaints ?

If you are Responding to Customer Complaints more delicately and precisely for the benefits of your company, then it would be positive and grows your customer pool. While Responding to Customer Complaints with casual and distorted ways, may loose your customer pool.

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