Complaints and disputes...can they have a happy ending?
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Do you believe that the worst complaints or disputes can end up with a positive outcome?
Here’s a typical scenario. A customer decides to buy a company’s product or engage their services. For whatever reason they finds themselves with a major complaint or dispute with that company. No one can argue that when this happens it is a poor customer experience.
If you were that customer then clearly that’s not what you expected or hoped for when you first engaged in the transaction. As the supplier or provider it’s the last thing you wanted for your customer.
Put simply customer experience doesn’t get much worse than when a situation results in this kind of outcome.
Whether you’re the customer, the product supplier or the service provider, no one can change the situation after the fact but what you can change is what happens next. How a problem situation is handled is how we judge an organisation. It is this that determines if they stay a customer into the future or if you lose them for good.
“How your business responds will determine if the customer ever buys your product or uses your services again.”
If it is your customer who has complained, then what you decide to do next is crucial to turn the situation around and address the problem. There are two actions here - one is external, the other is internal.
The external one is the customer facing action - the handling of the complaint or dispute. The skills required to handle these is too often underestimated. You need people with expertise in knowing how to best handle these sensitive and often heated situations and you must let them do what they need to do. Managing disputes requires a strategy to achieve the ultimate outcome which is to retain the customer. Customer satisfaction should always be the first priority.
In parallel is an internal action, where as a product supplier or service provider you must ask yourself and your teams ‘how did we end up here?’ How did the engagement go so wrong? How did it remain a known issue for so long without resolution? How did it end up like this? Finding the answers to these questions is critical to understanding and improving customer experience.