Dealing with Customer Complaints
Customer complaints feel negative, but in Total Quality Management they are treated as valuable information. A complaint is a chance to fix a problem, keep a customer, and improve the process so the same problem does not happen again.
Questions you may have include:
- Why treat complaints as valuable?
- How do you handle a complaint well?
- How do complaints help you improve?
Complaints are feedback
Most dissatisfied customers never complain — they simply leave and may tell others. So a customer who takes the time to complain is giving you something useful: a clear signal of what is wrong and a chance to make it right before they leave for good.
Handling a complaint well
A reliable approach is to:
- Listen fully and let the customer explain without interruption.
- Acknowledge the problem and the customer’s feelings, and apologize where appropriate.
- Resolve it promptly and fairly, doing what you reasonably can to set things right.
- Follow up to confirm the customer is satisfied with the outcome.
Using complaints to improve
Handling one complaint helps one customer; finding its root cause helps every future customer. By tracking complaints and asking why each occurred, you can correct the underlying process so the problem stops recurring — turning a single complaint into a lasting improvement.
Summary
Complaints are a free source of feedback and a chance to retain a customer. Handle each one by listening, acknowledging, resolving, and following up, and use the pattern of complaints to find and fix root causes so the same problems do not return.