Beating the customer service blame game

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13 May 2015

Billy MacInnesCustomer complaints, who needs ‘em? There’s a question that rarely gets asked or answered. The fact is that as long as there are customers, there will be complaints. The only variable is how many complaints there are.

Let’s face it, some people like complaining. They complain because nothing can ever be right for them. In the highly unlikely case that they can’t find anything to complain about, they’ll probably complain that they have nothing to complain about.

But just as with everything else in life, there’s good and there’s bad complaining. It might not seem like it at the time but sometimes a few customer complaints on the same issue can alert a business to the fact it has a problem it didn’t know it had. Other times it merely reinforces the impression that the people making the complaints are the ones with the problem, not the organisation or service they’re complaining about.

Whether a complaint is good or bad, the organisation should seek to deal with it in the same fashion. What it should not do, however, is to blame the person making the complaint. But according to research by alldayPA, which provides call answering services to UK businesses, quite a lot of organisations do exactly that.

The survey of 1,000 members of the public in the UK found that 70% preferred making their complaints by phone and that 76% had been frustrated by businesses refusing to apologise when things had gone wrong with a product or service. Worse still, 47% were told that the problems were their fault when they tried to make a complaint.

Negotiating skills
Now, it may well be true that some of the people making complaints are at fault for what they’re complaining about but there’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with that situation. Sticking your hands in your ears and shouting ‘it’s your own stupid fault’ down the phone line at them is not one of them.

According to alldayPA, companies may be understandably reluctant to accept the blame for a problem but that shouldn’t stop them from helping customers to deal with it.

Spokesperson Sue Ratcliffe says: “It’s important to strike the right balance so that customers feel that you are listening and doing your best to help them.”

She advises companies to acknowledge the issue, apologise if customers are unhappy, listen to what they have to say with as few interruptions as possible and focus on what can be done to help rather than what can’t.

The other issue guaranteed to infuriate upset customers is to put them through a series of automated call menus before they can talk to a real person. Needless to say, by the time they get to the person, their frustration at the process of getting there merely serves to intensify their irritation and anger.

If the alldayPA survey is accurate, then organisations would be well-advised to make sure they deal with customer complaints effectively. According to the survey, badly handled complaint calls were considered by 73% of respondents to be an indicator of poor customer services across a company, and 71% thought ineffective call handlers were the sign of a badly run or managed company. The report adds that as many as 42% “would mentally punish a business by assuming that its products aren’t up to the same standard as those available elsewhere as a result of poorly handled calls”.

So to answer the question ‘customer complaints, who needs ‘em?’, nobody needs them, but if they do get complaints, they definitely need to make sure they handle them correctly. Or else they’ll have some complaining of their own to make.

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