Joe Smith
Special to the Record
No individual or business is absolutely perfect and things can sometimes go awry. Mistakes happen and the best thing you can do is take to heart the old adage of learning from them. The ideal thing a businessperson can do when customers have issues with their service is to take the complaints seriously.
Complaints should be looked upon as valuable input that can help your business identify problems with products, services or employees. Most importantly, they afford you the opportunity to fix any issues that affect your brand. If you don’t deal with them to the satisfaction of your customer, the result can be very costly.
Customer relations guru Ruby Newell-Legner — who has extensive experience both in Canada and the USA — says that a typical business hears from just four per cent of its dissatisfied customers. That means that 96 per cent of them don’t bother contacting the business, even though they’re unhappy with something. The downside of this is that 91 per cent of customers who had a bad customer experience won’t willingly do business with that company again. On the positive side, however, resolving a complaint in the customer’s favour means 70 per cent of them will do business with you again. Not exactly a perfect outcome, but it simply proves you can’t appease everyone.
In dealing with customer complaints, the first order of business is to find out why they’ve got a problem. This sounds obvious, but there may be more to the issue than you think. This will require you to do some soul searching and ask yourself a few basic questions.
The following are just for starters. For example, what was it that you provided when you started up your business that encouraged customers to buy from you? Was it your price? Was it quality products or service? Was it your ability to deal with people on a more personal level? Was it the little extras or that added value which made you their choice? Was it the fact you were more involved with the community?
The next set of questions again only scratch the surface, but will hopefully help you pinpoint the problems. Have you become too expensive? Is there something you used to provide or offer your customers that you’ve stopped doing? Are you living up to your advertising and promotional promises? Are your staff (if you have them) properly trained in providing the personal service that helped build your reputation?
A fundamental part of winning back customers who complained is providing exceptional service that includes dealing with any complaint in a timely manner, resolving the issue to the customer’s satisfaction and engaging afterward with your customer to ensure you’ve got it right.
An analysis by Gallup has found that fully engaged customers are more loyal and profitable than average customers. When you engage positively with your customers, you bring them closer to your business, your organization and your brand which in the end can make everyone happy.
Joe Smith is a communications consultant and an accomplished fine artist. He can be reached via email at joesmith@shaw.ca