How to Handle Customer Complaints

Why Customer Complains?

No matter how great your products, you can not please everyone. Customer complaints are a normal part of any business.

Customer complaints are inevitable, no matter how streamlined your business. There will be design issue, manufacturing process issue, human errors, transportation issue, some complaints by mistake, or the guy just had a bad day, etc. The customers will complain since they do not/or they think they do not get what they are promised or what they expect.

The only constant is change. The expectation from the customers will be changing. Even you can match their needs today, it does not mean that, you can meet their needs tomorrow.

Why Tracking Customer Complaints Matters?

They must always be acknowledged and dealt with properly and effectively. By ignoring or dismissing complaints, you are obviously telling the customers that you don’t value their opinions. You are taking a huge risk of losing your customers. But if you know how to handle them and handle them effectively, customer complaints can be of great value and can be turned into constructive opportunities for your team and your business to grow.

If you can deal with the customer complaints properly and efficiently, not only will you earn the loyalty of that particular customer, but also of other customers who see how you handle these situations. Meanwhile, it is a good chance for continuous improvement, you can minimize the cost by identifying recurring problems and solve them before it escalates,  unearth problems you might not have been aware of or considered when you designed the products, then you have the opportunity to improve the design, optimize the process, and to boom your business.

Then how can you make it happen?

Customer Complaints Management Process.

Here is a brief process for the complaint management process. The real case will be much more complicated.

Why Use Customer Complaint Management Software?

Many business owners see complaint management as a time-consuming and frustrating process.

l  Multiple channels of complaints, but no centralized repository.

l  Difficult to track the status of the issues

l  Difficult to provide the expected date for solving the problems

l  No statistics information about the customer complaints and the root cause

l  Difficult to take this information as the input of new product design

A well-designed software can automate the customer complaint management process, it helps streamline customer service, improve operation and solve complex issues in a prompt, professional manner.

Several types of customer complaint management software programs exist, and each has distinctive features. Some are offered as part of customer relationship management systems; some are offered as part of Quality Management System(QMS), keeping all customer complaints with corrective actions and preventive actions in a centralized location. YunQuality QMS, for example, allows companies to easily record customer complaints, track interactions within the organization, set the owner of the issues, set deadlines for the response, analysis on the issue, categorize the issue and actions, take actions to correct the issue, and prevent it or similar issues from happening again. More important, you can easily get all the historical issues in the system, do the statistics analysis base on the issue, action, customer, issue type, severity etc. And find the input for the new product development to optimize the design. So you can use this software to gather feedback on areas that need improvements, do the analysis, take actions to improve and position yourself as a customer-centric organization.

The YunQuality QMS Customer Complaints Management module provides a comprehensive system for reporting, recording, assigning, investigating complaints and then resolving them through the built-in (Corrective Action and Preventive Action)CAPA function where non-conformance and root causes can be recorded and then resolved using the Corrective Action resolution features.

-       Handle customer complaints from multiple channels

Customer complaints can come through various channels like email, face to face, formal letter, phone call or live-chat. YunQuality QMS can group all these complaints together into one system. The receiver (eg customer service or CQE) can register it in the system for the other support staff to act on them.

-       Facilitate the communication in the organization

You can assign the issues to appropriate staff so that complaints never stay unattended in the wrong queue. The tickets will be sending to the personal task panel of the owner. Alerting mechanism in place to remind the owner to take the action required.

-       Categorize and prioritize the complaints

You can define the priority by setting up the severity and urgency of the issues, the organization can allocate the resource accordingly.

-       Reports and Analytics

You can have an overview of your complaints report, track areas that require work, understand performance of staff and the need to enhance operations. You can have tons of reports by one-click: complaint summary, in-process complaints, complaints categorized by type, product, department, severity, date, customer, etc.

-       Optimize the new product development and optimize the design

The biggest advantage of using a complaint management software like YunQuality QMS is to have Knowledge Lake for quality. Customer complaint is also a kind of VoC(Voice of the Customer)

It’s a fact. If you can, or if you have the proper tools, you can handle customer complaint effectively and efficiently. The value of properly handling customer complaints are tenfold. It is a competitive advantage in this global competition era.

YunQuality is a quality management software company, providing one-stop solution for quality excellence with a proven track records of value creation that helps propel our clients to next quality management level.

YunQuality offers cloud-based quality management software(YunQuality QMS), Enterprise quality management trainings and quality informatization consulting(ETC).

www.yunquality.com