Dealing with customer complaints is crucial for maintaining good relationships and improving business. Listening carefully, reflecting, and apologizing are important steps. Training all staff members to handle grievances can lead to more successful resolutions.
Customer complaints crop up in businesses of all sizes, and dealing with them quickly and appropriately is key to maintaining good customer relationships and improving overall business. Paying attention and listening carefully to a complaining customer is one of the most important things and is also commonly forgotten when people are faced with an angry customer. Having a system in place to handle complaints and training all staff members to handle them will avoid situations where complaints are handled poorly.
When a customer approaches a complaint, it is important to look at the relationship with the customer rather than an individual situation. Instead of trying to keep an order, the goal should be to keep the customer, in other words. Surveys involving customer complaints show that people are more likely to return if their complaints are handled quickly and well. People who feel that their customer complaints have been handled poorly can do more than not return. They can tell friends and family and they can also post hostile reviews online and it will result in loss of business.
The first step is to listen and reflect, demonstrating that the customer’s complaint is fully understood. While responding to customer complaints, people should avoid placing blame or trying to explain. For example, you might say, “What I’m hearing is that your entrees took a long time to come out of the kitchen,” instead of “Your food may have taken a long time to come out of the kitchen because our staff is busy.” The first response demonstrates that the customer is being heard and that the person handling the complaint understands why the customer is dissatisfied.
Apologizing after demonstrating understanding of the issue is important, as it offers a concrete solution to resolve the issue and make the customer inclined to return in the future. In the example above, the person handling the complaint might offer to take appetizers off the bill and provide a card offering free drinks or dessert with a future meal, to give the customer a reason to return.
A common problem that arises with customer complaints is that staff members are not trained to handle them or are trained to pass customers on to someone in a senior position. This can lead to situations where customers feel they are not being heard. Establishments that train all staff in handling grievances and empower staff members to do things like remove charges from bills or offer discounts to resolve grievances may have more successful grievance resolutions.
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