Many customers will continue doing business with you after they've been dissatisfied and complained.
In fact, according to the service recovery paradox, a complaint is an opportunity that can actually result in the customer having a more positive view of your business after a complaint is resolved than before they ever had a problem.
Being able to assess and address customer complaints efficiently is key to making this happen.
Great communication is an art. Honing it to a keen edge is a science. These tips will help you improve how you and your team talk to customers — starting today!
Customer complaints are often a sign that there's a disconnect between what customers expected and what you delivered. Sometimes that disconnect is caused by a customer's unreasonable expectations or incorrect assumptions. Other times, it's caused by something your company is doing wrong.
A customer complaint might be the result of your marketing copy leading them to believe something incorrect about your product/service — or of your user experience setting customers up for failure. Or it could reflect a problem that's happening outside of your direct control (e.g., third-party shipping issues).
The only way to find out is to give credence to customer complaints to determine if they contain genuinely useful feedback.
To uncover the reason you received a complaint from a customer and solve the problem in order to retain that customer, use this five-step process for handling customer complaints.
Complaints — even angry ones — can contain insights, and it’s your job to seek out the point of friction. Socratic questioning can help you get to the source of the issue.
Ask your customer questions like:
And ask yourself questions like:
Often, complaints are the result of problems that need to be solved. Asking the right questions helps you get to the root of the complaint, figure out if there's a way to resolve the issue, and determine if the complaint contains genuinely useful feedback.
If you determine that you aren't the right person to help with the customer's complaint and need to transfer them to someone who can, make sure to explain why. This can be as simple as saying, "I’m going to set you up with our specialist who will get that squared away for you right away."
A study from the University of Florida found that when dealing with customer complaints, you may run into one of the following types of customers, each "motivated by different beliefs, attitudes, and needs":
These are broad descriptions and, of course, your customers will present a more complex mixture of motivations and behaviors, but being aware of different persona types can help you respond most appropriately to the real person you are assisting.
When it comes to unhappy customers, a speedy response goes from being a nice-to-have to a necessity. Complaints are best resolved as soon as possible.
A customer leaving a feature request won’t mind at all if it takes you a day to respond, but customers who are in a “pulling my hair out” situation want a resolution yesterday. Make responding to them a priority.
It can be useful to set up a folder that's separate from the main support queue where you can filter less-than-ecstatic messages. Here, the team can see immediately which emails are from customers who need help right away.
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After you've identified the root cause of the customer's complaint, found a solution, and sent that solution to the customer, it's important to verify that the solution you proposed actually solved the problem. There are a couple of ways to do this:
In some cases, it may even be worth reaching back out to the customer after a few days have passed to make sure that everything is resolved.
You may also want to consider monitoring any satisfaction ratings you receive on the conversation in your customer service software. Negative feedback may be a sign that there are still issues that need to be addressed (though there will be times that you've done everything you can do and the customer will still leave upset).
If you've gotten one complaint from one customer about one specific issue over the last 10 years, that issue might not be worth addressing. But if you're getting multiple messages from multiple customers who all shared the same complaint, that's the beginning of a narrative.
To identify high-volume complaints, you'll need a system for tracking them. At Help Scout, we use the Help Scout + Jira integration to track customer complaints so we can capture them, monitor how often we're hearing recurring concerns, and follow up with each customer directly when the issue has been resolved.
Whatever system you use, the key is to make it easy to capture meaningful complaints and track the volume of customers who are bringing up similar or identical issues.
Handling customer complaints is just par for the course for support professionals, but that doesn't mean it won't take a toll on you emotionally from time to time.
So in addition to providing you with a process for handling customer complaints, we wanted to share these tips from Jeremey DuVall, Support Engineer at WordPress VIP, on how to keep yourself from feeling down on days when there's lots of negativity in the queue.
By rehearsing potential objections ahead of time, you can prepare before real-life negative interactions occur. Before launching a new product or feature, think about things that might attract polarizing opinions. This has three purposes:
In To Sell Is Human, Daniel H. Pink discusses how door-to-door salespeople experience “no” a heck of a lot. How do you keep your head up amongst that level of negativity?
Pink points to research on positivity ratios — the number of positive interactions to negative ones. If the ratio is high (say, 10:1), you’ll think nothing can go wrong (not necessarily realistic). A ratio of 1:1 is too pessimistic; the glass is half empty. A ratio of 3:1 is just about right.
While we don’t need to focus too specifically on the exact ratio, we do need to have tools in place to boost positivity when we feel ourselves slipping down the negativity slope. Here are some ideas:
We can explain negative interactions after the fact in a couple of ways. The feedback is either "permanent, pervasive, and personal," or "temporary, specific, and external."
When you view a negative interaction as permanent (not going away), pervasive (everyone feels this way), and personal (there’s a part of me that plays into this), you feel like you have little control over your environment. Things are happening to you.
The alternative to “permanent, pervasive, and personal” is “temporary, specific, and external.” In this light, negative interactions become more manageable and actionable.
First, negative interactions probably aren’t the norm (if they are, you’re doing something wrong). Second, negative feedback is usually specific to a certain product or thing. Finally, it’s external. It’s generally not about you or anything you are doing.
How do you put this into practice? Conduct personal reviews of negative feedback every so often to do the following:
Some people aren’t going to like what you build. That’s the cost of shipping things out into the world. If your product is great enough, there’s a good chance you’ll hear polarized opinions about it.
But by preparing ahead of time, maintaining appropriate positivity ratios, and framing feedback as temporary, specific, and external, you can arm yourself with ways to handle the negativity so you can address customer complaints efficiently and use them to create loyal customers.
