No matter how skilled and client friendly you can be as a business organization, complaints are inevitable. So, in fact there has to be a proper mechanism to handle these deadly elements, because if not, it will be your reputation that can get damaged and your profits to suffer a loss in the long run. What business organization did earlier was taking the complaint from the customer on a file or a spread sheet and asking the customer to stay tuned till a solution is given by the side of the company. The company then takes forever to come back to the customer with a proper solution or even a follow up, and the customer end up being disappointed waiting for solution that would never come. An unhappy customer is dangerous today, more than ever, because his bad comment about the company can possibly go to 200 more people, and with social media coming in with reviews and comments, this case is even worse. Customer complaint management earlier was complex and incomplete. A customer will not be happy only for the fact that his complaint was taken by the company. He then expects a proper follow up, and then a proper solution. The most common way of getting complaints recorded is by maintain a spread sheet, and this method could cause the following issues.
You don’t know who and who is working on the specific complaint, and to what extent they have investigated the complaint- because on a spreadsheet, there is no tracking. You don’t know whether the same complaint is addressed by two or more people in the team, once again due to no proper tracking possible on a spreadsheet. If some other detail with regards to a particular complaint is received, spreadsheets do not provide a link and everything will be considered as separate complaints. Thus, no proper analysis is possible.
These are just a few of many problems and all these issues could be eliminated by a properly structured customer complaint management. To any business organization, having such mechanism is highly recommended and the main reasons are as follows. This mechanism has automatic acknowledgement systems that can make customers feel heard and accepted once they raise their complaints. This ensures the fact that an ongoing communication will happen from the side of the company and that the customers or the complaints will not be left behind. This also ensures accountability. Once a complaint is handed over to any team member, all other team members get updated about it, and as there is regular updates coming up from the specific team member under his task, the team leader also can get a clear view of where each complaint is in the process of resolving it.
