How to Deal With Written Complaints in Business
By: Stephen THomson
Organization should have a good “complaints policy” to recover its customer’s confidence. It should accept complaints from customers as gift and should be processed effectively and immediately. With effective processing of complaint, a negative situation can be turned into positive one.
Customer complaint could be a verbal or a written complaint. In case of written complaint, organization should have a policy that employee should send a prompt reply within two days and satisfactory reply within two weeks of receiving the complaint from the customer.
When you receive a written compliant, you should send a personal letter to the customer, containing points such as thank you for the complaint, the customer is important to you and your business or organization, why the complain is appreciated, an apology, assurance of satisfactory action and a time frame by which customer will get suitable or satisfactory reply.
Your reply should look like a personal letter to customer, so avoid standard letters.
Write a letter, which is easy to read and understand, avoiding excessive use of technical terms & terminologies.
A prompt reply can help you to gain customer’s confidence and trust to some extent. However, if you want customer to remain with the organization and should not shift to your competitor brands, you should send a satisfactory reply within two weeks.
Agree with the customer & admit that he is right. Avoid use of sentences such as, we rarely receive such kind of complaints or you have started using the product without reading the instructions.
Always proofread your letters before sending it. You can use business writing software program with text enrichment feature for proofreading. Text enrichment enhances the simple sentence into more professional and sophisticated one
Try to exceed customer’s expectations. A complaining customer can become a loyal customer with better than expected treatment. So, try to give the customer a bit more than his expectation or demand, if reasonable. However, if customer demands and expectations are unreasonable, refuse them, but without showing any anger or bitterness.
Three Tips for Dealing With Customer Complaints.
By: Lasse Kohau
The article gives a brief abstract on how to handle complaints.
A) Do always make it easy for your customers to complain, even though your business or people do not like complaints. One of your businesses key success-factors is the possibility to be able complain, if customers feel, that you have done them wrong. Your business must have a specific complaint policy, and you have to make it known by your customers. The policy should be built on contacts, specificity and responsibility. Your target in the department of complaints is easy contact.
B) Look at complaints as a help to develop your business further along the road to success. Complaints are often a great source of information to your company, and could act as innovate and inspirited way of making new customers. It all depends on the mindset of your employees.
Complaints can gain valuable ideas for new products, services, and business opportunities. Complaints could also recover a loose-loose situation and helping customers to getting the right service or product, which they have acquired.
C) Do appreciate the complaint to the customer (make your service outstanding). Most customers do not expect to get a letter or an email saying; thank you for your complaint. You could easily pick a note like this in a letter or email to your customer saying;
1) Thank you for your time and suggestions, it will help us in the future continuing building an even better business.
Or this one;
2) I appreciate your bringing this subject to our attention, so we could correct the problem as fast as possible.