Complaint management: use customer criticism as an opportunity

Fear Free Culture opens error employee

Complaints and claims are used by service providers still too rare to improve their services. Instead, the displeasure of the customer is often perceived as a personal insult, unsystematic detected or even ignored and covered up entirely. Ensure that companies squander a great opportunity: Because with an active Board of Management allows customers keep long term, address weaknesses and build trust.

Then makes the Cologne Service Rating GmbH in a recent study of the appeal management of about 100 trade and service companies as well as to influence the quality of complaint handling on customer loyalty attentive.

Accordingly, the quality of the handling of complaints plays a more important role for customers in customer loyalty than, for example, the price-performance ratio or other performance criteria such as the variety of offers or the attractiveness of the service location.

What is needed is a corporate culture in which all employees are grateful for customer complaints," says Dr. Claus Dethloff, Managing Director of ServiceRating GmbH. "You can only check your actual level of service and optimize it in a targeted manner if you can hold yourself in the mirror."

Progressive companies therefore even stimulate their customers to complain. Because they know about the special value of the "hidden" information from the criticism of the customers for the improvement of their customer orientation.

Need to catch up on complaints management

In an industry comparison, customer complaints at energy suppliers and especially personnel service providers have so far been recorded least regularly and systematically. Financial service providers are more exemplary in this regard, while retail is in the middle. However, there is still some catching up to do here: The findings of the complaints recording are sometimes not transferred consistently enough into concrete quality assurance measures and their success is often only insufficiently monitored. In addition, the processing of complaints often takes too long in the eyes of customers.

In general, complaints are not forwarded to the head office or the responsible departments in more than one in three companies surveyed. More than a quarter put the way in which complaints are processed at the discretion of their own employees; in every fifth company there are no clear regulations at all.

"There are often complaints that employees do not report because they themselves are negatively affected," explains Dr. Dethloff. "Although this is human, valuable information for quality management is lost. The decisive factor for professional complaint management is therefore the promotion of an open, fearless error culture," says the expert.

Source: Cologne [ ServiceRating GmbH ]