How to Create Your Own Customer Complaint Process

In my last post, The Right Way and The Wrong Way to Handle Customer Complaints, I compared the complaint procedures for an uber-large corporation, Comcast, to a small business. You're probably thinking, that's unfair. After all, Comcast has a lot of resources that a small business owner doesn’t.

Actually, a small business can craft a complaint-handling process that will allow it to gain a competitive advantage over a larger, more bureaucratic organization. It doesn’t require additional resources; it requires a shift in the owner’s attitude.

10 ways to deal with customer complaints

Here’s a 10-step process to help your organization improve service recovery in order to increase customer loyalty.

1. Know the cost of customer loyalty

Understand that, as Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company has found, it’s five times less expensive to retain customers than it is to acquire them.

2. Develop a customer complaint handling process

Pull together a group of your experienced employees from various departments, share the above fact with them, and ask them to create a customer complaint handling process designed to retain the majority of customers when they have complaints, questions, or suggestions.

3. Empower employees to handle complaints

Empowering employees to handle complaints with a first-call resolution is critical. Identify whom to empower and how you will empower them to achieve this goal.

4. Communicate customer complaints upward

Create a process to communicate complaints upward so that upper management can identify trends. Perhaps a vendor’s latest shipment is substandard—but the only way you'll recognize this problem is by analyzing your customer complaints. How many customers can you save by understanding and getting on top of these issues?

5. Create a process for supervisors to deal with complaints

If a front-line employee is confronted with a complaint and cannot handle it for whatever reason, create a clear and simple process for the complaint to be communicated upward to a supervisor. Time is of the essence.

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6. Analyze current customer complaint policies and procedures

And revise those that may stand in the way of providing more efficient customer service resolutions.

7. Recognize great employees

Realign your rewards and recognition policies to reward employees engaging in extraordinary customer service.

8. Develop an internal communications plan

Once you have finalized your complaint process, develop an internal communications plan that reveals the benefit to the customer, to your organization, and most importantly to your employees. It is critical that they understand it is in their best interests to provide extraordinary customer service—especially when complaints can drive away customers.

9. Ask for feedback

Create a feedback mechanism to monitor the implementation of the new process. Remember that, as the U.S. Army believes, “No plan survives the first contact intact.”

10. Monitor and tweak

Continually monitor the process and tweak when necessary, even after the initial implementation is over.

Importance of creating a customer complaint policy

Underlying this new process is the fact that your employees must be engaged. The cliché, “Happy Employees Make Happy Customers,” is a cliché because it’s true. Don’t take a shortcut here.

Let me close with one last quote from Fred Reichheld: “Just a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by as much as 125%.

About the Author

Glenn Ross promptly handles all complaints on Twitter. Follow him at @txglennross.