In the complaint management process, a complaint passes through various stations. So that the customer can submit a complaint in the first place, your company should set up simple options for providing feedback. This can be a hotline, a chat or an email address, but feedback could also be submitted via web forms or postcards. Companies should always explicitly indicate such options. In this way, customers are encouraged to give feedback.
After this, the complaint is processed. Here, friendliness and understanding on the part of the trained employee play a major role. Ensure that your customers also learn what actions will be taken after their criticism. When possible, the customer should be able to understand what sort of consequences their criticism will have. Sometimes, however, ongoing communication regarding a specific matter is not economically feasible. For this reason, business professionals must weigh what type of response still makes sense at that point and what would exceed a reasonable response.
The next step is to handle the customer’s complaint. This also includes forwarding it to the appropriate department. Knowing that their feedback was accepted with appreciation and will lead to a change is already enough for many customers. Others, however, require further action to be satisfied. For this, your support employees must have the appropriate resources available. In this step the employee thus responds directly to the customer and offers a discount, product exchange, repairs or some other perk.
At the same time, the execution of internal tasks begins. The inbound complaint is analyzed and categorized, and in this way delivers information on what must be changed within the company. Both the auditing and reporting tasks then follow, i.e. the complaint management process itself is reviewed. At the same time, efficiency is also assessed: Is customer satisfaction adequately represented by the inbound complaint? In this context, one solution may be to encourage complaint stimulation.
The information from the audit is prepared and presented to company executives or other decision-makers. Next, this branch of complaint management also deals with execution. The collected and prepared data must be made use of in order to improve quality management. This could be details that only concern a small production stage and can be expeditiously implemented. In the long-term, however, it is possible to initiate structural changes that have an impact on the entire company.