Customer complaint does not always mean something is wrong with your services or product, we often received complaints as a negative omen but it also serves as a positive pointer to direct our attention to customer needs or pain points, understanding the value of customer complaints is an important precursor take your company a competitive level, we are in the age of comparing different industries’ customer experiences and expect the same at every transaction.
Customer complaint helps an organization to evaluate and improve its policies and procedure, most action by the organization is meant to increase sales and provide enabling environment for business transaction for customers, in most of my customer experience management training in Abuja and Lagos Nigeria, I mostly emphasize that the value of customer complaints will become clear when organization start seeing the need for improvement in policies and procedures.
Companies are expected to carry out a mystery shopping quarterly or yearly as the case may be, in the absence of this mystery shopping according to Nigeria mystery shoppers provider company will have to listen to the voice of customers, this customer complaint will high the key areas where product or service of a company need upgrading, updating or system overhauling. Customers may also point to the need to train staff or develop close supervision for staff to avoid customer churning
Customer complaints will also expose the inconsistency of service or process in an organization, with the power of intuition customers easily note if a product or service is different from the usual expectations, this will in turn show the loyalty of the customer to a particular brand and why customer patronize a product or services.
If a company is inundated with new complaints, the management needs to see it as a pay cheque and quickly attend to the complaints, it could the company competitors have reviewed their policy and procedure or introduced a new technology that the customer is expecting the company to also put in place.
Customer complaints most time reveal the most frequent ask questions for a product or service, these complaints will help the organization to provide ready-made or automated answers to these questions on the product or service guide or place them on the website for easy access, this will reduce the number of contact with the customers and reduce the level of complaint overtime, adequate product or service education will create a good customer experience and will also show that your organization is proactive and not reactive to customer plight.
Aliyu Ilias is the Author(Customer Service Management,Understanding Customer Experience in Africa & CEMBundle).He writes from Abuja
