If you want to establish professional complaint management, here are five practical tips and a step-by-step guide.
1. Build a complaint management team
The most important task is preventing customer loss. Team members therefore need:
- Detailed knowledge of company products and services
- Excellent communication skills
- Coordination with the legal department to avoid legal escalation
- Familiarity with all regulatory requirements
- Coordination with product management to improve quality
2. Ensure every complaint reaches the team
An overview of every complaint across the company is essential, regardless of the customer's communication channel. How can you learn without complete information? Only complete knowledge allows companies to learn and improve products and services.
3. Categorise complaints from the customer's perspective
Categorisation enables detailed reporting and reveals product and service weaknesses from the customer's viewpoint.
Building categorisation trees is challenging. The level of detail needs to support structured registration of every case. Trees can become so large that assigning complaints correctly becomes difficult.
Customers prefer email or contact forms, so complaints arrive as unstructured text. Analysis requires data structures, which categorisation trees provide.
Build trees from the customer's perspective. These multilevel hierarchies include every relevant customer experience.
Top levels often relate to products or processes, which can quickly become unwieldy depending on industry and volume. We have developed practical alternatives to maintain clarity, which I will discuss in a future post.
4. Identify causes and solve the problem
You cannot learn from complaints without knowing their causes.
Investigation takes time. I have repeatedly seen companies skip meaningful root cause analysis because of time pressure.
Others engage in extensive blame, damaging internal acceptance. Aim to learn constructively.
Useful root cause analysis should include at least:
- The product defect, linked to the product or article and supplier
- The specific process, rather than a generic “process problem”
Avoid targeting individual employees or entire departments, which opens the door to counterproductive blame.
Customers expect solutions: replacing a faulty product, apologising for late delivery or refunding services not received. The range of solutions is so broad that, depending on volumes, manual processing may no longer be feasible.
5. Respond comprehensively and promptly
No response, or a late response, can seriously damage a relationship. At minimum, send an immediate acknowledgement. This already shows whether your company takes service and complaints seriously.
I often read: “We are currently experiencing high volumes. Please be patient and refrain from further enquiries.”
How does that make customers feel? Am I important? Am I just one of many, despite being a regular customer who has generated substantial revenue?
Professional complaint management is extremely important. You lose customers when you do not take complaints seriously.
Build a professional system
Customers expect complete, comprehensive answers. Address every point in their complaint. Not every complaint concerns a defect or a problem caused by the company. Nevertheless, each response is an opportunity to restore satisfaction and build long-term retention.
Do not miss this valuable opportunity. Build a professional complaint management system.