When responding to a customer complaint, your company should have one main goal and that is to defend its name. Within this process, the first thing that needs to be done by your company is to check the information and try to figure out who wrote the complaint and why they wrote it. This information can likely be found by analyzing the complaint to find hints of information about the author. Normally, those who leave complaints don’t leave their true identity or contact information. Once your company finds out who wrote the complaint, you should get together a response for the complainant. This complaint response should be well written, it should answer the complainant somewhat directly and it should come directly from a respected and high authority.
The department that worked with the customer should write the response and it should be edited and signed by the company’s CEO. This will allow for a filtering of the response that will rid it of any emotional attachments.
In addition to putting together a response, your company should also check the damage of the complaint. Things to you may want to check are other complaint boards, user responses and the search engine rank of the complaint.
If the complaint has influenced a negative spread and additional complaints, your company should look to respond promptly to the complaint. To find the true spread of the complaint, you could use search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. With these search engines, you should search the name of your company and see which complaints show up and respond to them from highest to lowest ranked.
The goal of the response is for your company to confront the mistake and seek a resolution. In addition, your company should provide a positive image of the company and alternative methods for complainants to resort their anger. This alternative method should include either the websites testimonial section, using the contact form on the company website or contacting the company CEO. By providing links and email addresses to these other sources, you can prevent future complaints on third party websites from happening.
The best solution comes by contacting the complainant directly to solve the issue at hand, and once they are satisfied with the results, you should ask the customer if they would be polite enough to remove the complaint or request removal of the complaint. Someone simply listening to the customers concern and finding a mutual understanding can easily resolve most complaints. You can prevent future complaints by sending out progress reports to customers and by encouraging customer feedback and satisfaction through these reports. This will allow for small problems to not turn into big problems.
- Don’t try to do everything - June 5, 2023
- The Follow-Up - June 4, 2023
- Personal Branding - June 2, 2023
Dr. Elijah Clark (July 5, 2022). Repairing Strategy – Responding to a Customer Complaint [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://elijahclark.com/repairing-strategy-responding-customer-complaint/
