CONCLUSION

Next Steps from Top to Bottom

The topic of complaint handling is a gigantic subject. Of course, I didn’t cover everything in this book, but enough is in here to keep you busy for a long time. It certainly does for me! The critical question is, How do you start? Where do you begin? You can’t do everything. If you read this book in hard copy and use a highlighter or electronically highlight your ebook copy to mark the ideas that captured your attention, you probably will see a pathway you can follow. Perhaps you think you can do this in your organization. If so, you are already partway there because you have a mindset that you can all improve handling complaints.

Part of your next steps will depend on your role in your organization. Individuals will probably be more interested in focusing on how to deal with complaining customers. Managers will want to encourage their CSRs to practice the best complaint-handling techniques. Leaders of organizations should look to create a service-recovery map. I’ll include a brief description below.

Next Steps for Individuals

How you begin to implement the ideas in this book is up to you. The first three chapters deal with understanding complaints, why we get so few of them, and why complaints are gifts. These chapters will provide a robust foundation regarding your beliefs and mindsets about complaint handling.

The philosophy of A Complaint Is a Gift is covered in depth. And a careful reading of chapter 4 will teach you about the Gift Formula. It’s a central focus of this book. Once you have developed a habit of always thanking your customers for their feedback, you will continually reinforce what this book is all about.

Your next steps should focus on using the Gift Formula in various situations and to their maximum. This includes handling upset and aggressive customers. While trying several techniques to better react to angry customers, chapter 8 also shows how to develop mental fortitude to protect yourself from becoming emotionally upset while handling complaints. Chapters 9 and 10 follow complaints on the internet. While you, as an individual, may not have the ability to set policy regarding complaints on the internet, it is helpful to see how the internet is changing the world of complaints. Finally, chapter 11 looks at how to give gifts when you complain.

Victoria Holtz and I have also written A Complaint Is a Gift Workbook, with 101 activities offered in a blended-learning package that round out this book. It was designed as an individual workbook on this topic and also as a workbook to accompany training programs. On the website AComplaintIsAGift.com, you will find a facilitator’s guide for anyone who would like to offer a complete training program using the A Complaint Is a Gift Workbook as course material. There is some overlap, but basically, the workbook is focused on the how-to of complaint handling. Complaints involve emotional intelligence that must be applied to each unique transaction with a customer. With a well-established mindset about complaints, you can appreciate how the complex nature of complaint handling requires a broad understanding of the emotional aspects of complaints. In fact, the more you learn about complaint handling, the more its complexity is revealed. It’s life-long learning because psychologists continue to demonstrate deeper understanding of human interactions. This continuous learning is part of your individual next steps in complaint handling.

Next Steps for CSR Teams and Their Managers

Researchers who use big-data research tools uncover significant amounts of knowledge. This kind of data analysis is likely to become the future in research methodology. It’s sure to reveal details about customer behavior we didn’t know before. It will notify us about the best ways for complaint handlers to respond. It will enable us to get deep into the weeds of appropriate methods when interacting with customers so we can keep them loyal.

Vast amounts of information are available regarding recent research and comments from customers. This information will be helpful to managers who are often responsible for responding to online complaints and comments. The demand on management teams will be to keep in close touch with what is happening on the internet. Managers (or assistants) need to allocate time to become researchers for internal information, as this research shouldn’t be ignored. Careful division of managerial time needs to be considered in the coming years.

Discuss the topics and questions after each chapter with your teams. When groups of CSRs get together and explore complaint issues, I invite you to look at the A Complaint Is a Gift Workbook. It is jam-packed with 101 activities that will keep your CSRs constantly learning for an extended period. Visit our website, AComplaintIsAGift.com. It’s filled with resources to deepen your knowledge and understanding of complaint handling. The workbook was written for people who do the challenging work of handling customer complaints, solving customers’ problems, and getting them to leave in a state of satisfaction—maybe even delight! The workbook can also be used as a training tool taught by managers or training experts inside your organization. At the URL address listed above, you will also find a Train the Trainer guide for the workbook and a complete set of PowerPoint slides to use with programs.

Next Steps for Your Entire Organization

If you can get everyone in your organization to accept that complaints are gifts, then the other ideas will help you make that happen at an operational level. If your team members are interested in complaints as gifts, gather them together and get their input on starting.

How do you and your colleagues think about customers who complain? Do you know the best ways to interact with them when they complain so they walk away feeling positive about themselves and your business—and want to continue doing business with you? That’s what this book is all about. In short, it’s about the mindsets you and your colleagues throughout the organization hold about all the different aspects of complaints. Complaints as gifts can become the watchword throughout your entire organization. Then you have a culture that supports interacting with customers so that when they complain, everyone knows how to handle their complaints and turn dissatisfied customers into emotionally satisfied customers.

Effective complaint handling starts by appreciating that businesses don’t get to exist without customers. Customers can choose whether they want to continue doing business with you after they experienced a problem, or they may feel they were rudely treated or feel otherwise dissatisfied. What they say about you as a business and whether they want to come back depends on how they are treated after feeling upset or discouraged because we didn’t live up to what we promised in our marketing.

Setting up a carefully mapped service-recovery process will help your entire organization. Once the senior team that sets strategy maps your approach to service recovery, it will need to take the following steps:

The better you are at creating a culture to support the A Complaint Is a Gift mindset, the more you will hear complaints, fix customer issues, and then retain your customers. You won’t have to use costly efforts toward getting new customers; instead, you can focus on taking care of existing customers. These customers will more likely trust you to deliver on your marketing promises, and you’ll get more feedback that speaks to the partnership you enjoy with your customers.

The ability to handle complaints starts with the understanding that feedback is nothing you need to be frightened of. Instead, it’s the biggest gift you get from the marketplace. Yes, everyone likes the statements of appreciation about what we did for someone. These statements can turn a challenging day into a glorious one. But the most valuable behavior we get to see is when customers let us know something wasn’t right for them, and then we see that customer returning, glad to see us again.