Strategies When Customers Complain

Reliability and doing things right the first time are important factors in customer judgement
of service quality. However, service failures or mistakes are inevitable and in such cases,
effective recovery measures are essential to save or build the relationship. Zeithaml and
Bitner (1996) report that studies in different industries showed that a dissatisfied complaining
customer told between 9 and 16 people about their poor experience whereas a satisfied
customer told only 4 to 5 people about his or her positive experience. They add that some
recovery strategies to be implemented when things go wrong should include the following.

Some of the strategies to use when a customer complaint about the company, product or
service offered include the following.

1. Apologize to the customer.

2. Take ownership of the problem.
3. Get to the root of the issue.
4. Solve the problem.
5. Offer something extra.
6. Follow up with the customer.

1. Apologize to the customer.

The first step to service recovery is offering a sincere and heartfelt apology to the customer. It
must not feel mechanical and you must ensure that the customer feels like you mean it.

Show that you appreciate and regret what the customer has gone through in the situation.
Think about what the customer wants to hear from an apology and offer it to them. What is
driving their frustration? How are they feeling at the moment? Take a moment to step into
their shoes.

These phrases can help to show that you want to work with the customer:

 "I completely understand how frustrating that would be."

 "I get it. I would be upset too."
 "I'm going to make this right for you."

Listen closely to the customer's problem and tailor your apology to their unique
circumstances. This is no time for a boilerplate message that obviously feels copy and pasted.

The customer wants to feel like you are taking their side and listening closely to what they
are saying. They want to feel like they are your top priority and that their problem is being
taken seriously.

2. Take ownership of the problem.

You need to empower your employees to take ownership of the problem and take steps to
correct it. No customer wants to feel passed around to different team members or feel like
your service rep is blaming the situation on someone else.

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Allow your employees to take control and use their time and effort to solve customer
problems. Enable them to use the company's resources to help customers recover from
service breakdowns instead of passing the buck to a senior manager.

Structure your support team so reps are empowered to solve problems quickly and efficiently,
without having to ask permission from managers. Ensure the service they provide is speedy
and efficient.

The front line worker should take initiative to solve the customer’s problem on the spot.
Acknowledgement of the problem, an apology, an explanation when appropriate and a
solution to the problem are often all that the customer wants. Whatever the recovery solution,
customers want it immediately, not after a number of phone calls, red tape or being passed
from one person to another.

3. Get to the root of the issue.

You've apologized to the customer and taken ownership of the problem. Now is the time to
ask follow-up questions and do some digging to get to the root of the issue and find out if you
can fix the problem.

When working on service recovery, it's important to do as much of the investigative work as
you can, rather than relying on the customer to tell you what happened or troubleshoot with
you. Frustrated customers don't want to answer additional questions and they don't want to
repeat themselves. Instead, read through past conversations, walk through the customer's
experience and figure out as much as you can yourself.

Only when you feel like you have the full context of the issue should you return to the
customer to ask any additional questions. Because you've already offered them an apology
and aligned yourself as an advocate, they'll be much more amenable to working with you on a
solution.

Track and identify failures and view them as opportunities to save and retain customer
relationships. This is based on the notion that the customer who complains is your friend
whereas customers who do not complain are not likely to come back and may influence other
potential customers from doing business with the organisation. An effective service recovery
strategy requires identification of failure points through listening to customers, monitoring
complaints, collecting critical incidents and soliciting feedback through suggestion boxes for
both employees and customers.

Learn from recovery experiences. By tracking service recovery efforts and solutions,
managers can often learn about systematic problems in the delivery system that need fixing.
Through an analysis of root causes, managers can identify the sources of problems, modify
processes, and eliminate the need for recovery.

4. Solve the problem.

Once you've discovered the cause of the problem, it's time to go about fixing it. You might
have to replace a substandard service or product, which is key to meeting customer
expectations.

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Empower and train front line agents to solve problems. Since the customers demand service
recovery on the spot, front line employees need the skills, authority and incentives to engage
an effective recovery action. Effective recovery skills include hearing the customer’s
problems, identifying solutions, improving and perhaps bending the rules from time to time
in order to resolve the problem quickly.
Bevington and Samson (2012, p. 539) state that,
“Competent employees don’t remain competent forever. Skills deteriorate and can become obsolete,
and new skills need to be learned. That’s why U.S. corporations with a hundred or more employees
spent more than $125 billion on formal training in a recent year.”

Don't let the conversation with the customer end until you've managed to fix the problem.
This requires service reps with excellent problem-solving skills and you need to make sure
you train them in service recovery.

Solving the problem means that the customer is satisfied with the resolution. Remember to
ask follow-up questions to check that the customer feels the problem has been fixed and don't
make assumptions.

5. Offer something extra.

A customer may have been thoroughly inconvenienced by your service lapse and it's not
enough to offer exactly what they should have received in the first place. You may need to
offer something extra, like free shipping or a free month's subscription, in order to make up
for the customer's sense of injustice.

Come up with creative ways to restore customer happiness with your products and brand.
Remember that your customer has been stressed out and inconvenienced by the service issue,
and you need to go that extra mile to make up for the hassle.

6. Follow up with the customer.

Once you've closed the conversation with the customer, don't forget to follow up with them to
check they are satisfied with the resolution. Show your concern for the customer by sending a
follow-up email or making a follow-up phone call, which means you can also catch any
further issues the customer may be experiencing.

Make sure you let your co-workers know that the customer was the victim of a service
failure. Any further interactions with the customer should be made with this in mind so your
staff can communicate appropriately without the customer having to explain their issue over
again.

Consider sending a handwritten note to the customer to show how much you appreciate their
business. Customer appreciation: Organisations should not take their customers for granted.
After providing the required services, organisations should thank the customers for bringing
business as this gesture goes a long way towards retaining individual customers. In the case
of the best customers, organisations should send letters of appreciation addressed to the
customer by name or dialling a personal phone call would have a greater impact. Letters
addressed as ‘Dear Valued Customer’ are not considered kind and such an impersonal
approach could be counter-productive.

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