Don’t Just Resolve Complaints, Learn From Them

If yours is a savvy company, then you work hard to turn out a great product, you employ and train outstanding personnel, you have an effective quality control process and you are dedicated to providing an exceptional customer care program. Congratulations! So, tell me, does all of this effort ensure that you will never have to deal with customer complaints? Of course not! However, any company committed to this level of excellence should take customer complaints seriously, because they are like medicine: good for what ails you (even if you don’t know you are sick). Let me explain.

Nobody likes customer complaints, but where there is smoke there is – or there is about to be – a fire. Customer complaints function as an early warning system to let you know there may be problems coming. So, even though customer complaints can be hard to listen to, and sometimes difficult to deal with, they can also help to make your company stronger in some area if you will just dedicate yourself to taking them seriously and professionally.

Three F’s Will Put You at the Head of the Class

In these days of grade inflation, kids in school probably don’t ever receive an F as a grade on anything anymore. In my day, getting an F in a class was painful, and getting three Fs was the academic kiss of death. My, how times have changed! Why, these days any self-respecting customer service rep wants to aim for three Fs at all times! Let me explain.

One of the most difficult challenges a customer service rep can face is dealing with difficult customers – people who are angry, disappointed, or hard to please. As these folks drone on and on about their problems and frustrations, the pressure begins to build in the CSR to do something to turn this horror story into a success story. So, what do you do? Apply the three F process.

Example of Really Bad Customer Service

The post the other day on customer service reminded me of a story from two years ago when a guy called in to AOL to cancel his account.  Now, if you think you’ve had a poor customer service experience in the past, you have got to hear this guy.  I understand the importance of retaining existing cusotmers, but when a company deliberately makes it impossible to leave, I think that crosses a line.

But what made this experience different is that the customer recorded the phone call.  Vincent Ferrari then posted his experience on his website and it gained momentum from there, even landing him an interview on the Today Show.

So how bad was the call?  Check out the interview below with some excerpts from his call:

My favorite quote: “When I say ‘cancel the account,’ I don’t mean ‘help me figure out a way to keep it’ – I mean ‘cancel the account.’”

The Good Kind of Pyramid Scheme

By now there is almost universal agreement in the business community that excellent customer service is the key to holding on to customers, which, in turn, is the key to sustaining long-term profitability. After all, it costs almost 10 times as much to sell a customer the first time as it does to sell to him the second time. You do the math. So the million dollar question here is, “How can your company build stellar customer loyalty?” The answer is, gradually and professionally. And it all comes by gaining an understanding of the customer service pyramid.

Before you can deliver excellent customer service – the kind that leads to long-term customer loyalty – you need to make sure you understand how excellent customer service looks from the customer point of view. Companies spend a lot of time designing elaborate systems that they think will be helpful to customers, only to discover customers aren’t impressed at all. Generally, customers are looking for a few simple, practical value items when they do business with you. These items build on one another, which is why it is called the Customer Service Pyramid.

Processed Cheese

Food processors are amazing inventions. They can puree a pound of strawberries and bananas into a wonderful smoothie in no time; they can turn a batch of ice into the base for a slushy, refreshing beverage. Come to think of it, processing anything – with or without a food processor – tends to destroy individual characteristics in favor of unopposable conformity. It happens all the time in customer service, too. Your customer comes to you with what to him is a unique, personal need and too often it seems your only option is to press the puree button and conform him to the options your “process” says are available.

 

We all know “processing” customers can be bad for business. What are you doing to make customer service a positive experience for your customers?