Does this sound familiar? You manually fill in Excel spreadsheets and use Office tools to handle complaints. You process everything by hand, and your manager asks: how many complaints did we have last month?
I'll show you five important benefits of a professional complaint management tool and share useful tips.
1. Prevent customer churn
When a customer complains, you have an opportunity to restore satisfaction. You do not know how many chances remain. Use this valuable opportunity and handle every complaint or claim quickly, with a focus on solutions.
Which organisation, apart from the Catholic Church, knows how many customers have left because complaints and claims were handled unprofessionally? Preventing customer churn is an important complaint management goal.
You can measure satisfaction with complaint handling. Use complaint satisfaction surveys, ideally after every resolved complaint. Move from gut feelings to figures, data and facts.
2. Meet regulatory requirements
Legislators and supervisory authorities, particularly in banking and insurance, set clear expectations for complaint handling through bodies and frameworks such as EBA, ESMA, BaFin and MiFID II. These requirements call for a capable complaint management system.
Regulatory requirements define complaint management processes in detail. Failure to comply can result in financial penalties from supervisory authorities.
3. Improve company products and processes
Shouldn't every company aim to keep improving its products and services? In theory, yes; in practice, not always. Monopolies have little incentive to see complaint management as an effective retention tool because of their dominant position. Poor product quality and services cost companies money.
Some practical examples:
- Flight delays
- Late deliveries
- Vehicle and food recalls
- Poor product quality
How many reasons for complaints do you think exist in your company?
If you cannot answer, consider introducing a complaint management system.
4. Meaningful reporting on complaints and their causes
Meaningful analysis is one of the most demanding aspects of complaint management. Important metrics include complaint categories from the customer's perspective, causes and those responsible, and refund costs, to name a few.
A professional tool analyses complaint frequency by target group, period comparisons, handling times and many other details. Modern dashboards visualise the customer, product and cost perspectives and make analysis easier. Include customers' satisfaction with complaint handling too.
5. Increase efficiency
A professional system takes care of many tasks:
- It imports emails and postal correspondence and recognises complaint content.
- You can complete each step in the application rather than manually using Office tools.
- Each complaint is organised, helping you maintain an overview.
- Colleagues stay informed because the system records every status and response sent to customers.
- You create replies using text modules rather than writing everything manually.
- You work with to-do lists and electronic files that keep documents clearly organised in the application.
- Access permissions protect sensitive information.
- You assign tasks and route them electronically to colleagues rather than doing everything yourself.
Complaint management affects every department with direct or indirect customer contact. Treat it as a core process that needs to be integrated with the wider organisation.
Integration is the key: connections must be possible with different ERP systems, accounting, CRM systems and more.
The system must fit your industry and allow you to define your specific complaint cases and everything associated with them. When choosing a solution, look for business-level configurability so you can represent your cases precisely without needing the IT department.