Making it easier for customers to complain
Featured in the Complaint handling for positive outcomes training manual
By Nina Lockwood
Category: Customer Service
Credit price: 2 download credits (Single user)
The Technical Assistance Research Programs Corporation (TARP) of Washington, DC, which publishes statistics on customer complaints, has found that for every customer complaint that an organisation receives, there are 26 other dissatisfied customers who will remain silent. Each of the 27 dissatisfied customers will tell 8 to 16 others about the experience and 10 per cent will tell more than 20 other potential customers. Amazingly, this means that three complaints can translate into more than 1,000 potential customers hearing about the poor service an organisation provided. If we are able to make it easier for customers to tell us when they are dissatisfied, we can start to change the message from that of poor service to that of fantastic service from our organisation.
You start by emphasising the business reasons for making it easier for customers to complain. In groups of three or four, participants then use their own personal experiences to identify the potential barriers customers have to overcome in order to make a complaint. At the end of this exercise, you debrief the whole group, compiling a master list of barriers to overcome. In the second part of the training activity, the participants look in detail at a number of the perceived barriers, and come up with suggested solutions. Again, this exercise draws on their experience and you should make suggestions that take the group towards the ‘people’ aspect of complaint handling. Finally, once some solutions have been suggested, the participants work on proposed methods and actions required to introduce the new ways of working.
Who is it for: This training resource is intended for use by trainers to help participants look at ways in which front-line staff can make the process of complaining easier and therefore encourage more customers to tell the organisation when things are not right.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 6 |
| Max Group Size: | 12 |
| Typical Duration: | 02:00:00 |
| No of Pages: | 10 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training resource is intended for use by trainers with all members of staff, particularly those with customer-facing responsibilities, whether face-to-face or on the telephone. It is particularly useful to involve staff working in operational functions so as to get a good cross-section of input when considering new ideas for company processes in this area.
Download the training activity, Making it easier for customers to complain as featured in the Fenman training manual; Complaint handling for positive outcomes