Why you should start using complaints as an opportunity

Customer complaints occur in the best companies. Dealing with dissatisfied customers and with the company's mistakes is necessary to retain customers and optimize processes. In this article you will learn how to use complaints as an opportunity.

Complaint management comprises the measures provided by a company in the event of complaints or claims from a customer, as well as the documentation of these. The goal is to maintain customer satisfaction despite a negative incident and avoid customer churn. Customer service representatives strive to limit the damage or compensate the customer. Ultimately, the goal should be to identify the source of the error and avoid it in the future and maintain the company's reputation. Every complaint offers the company the opportunity to further improve products and processes. Complaint management is therefore a central component of the continuous improvement process. Good complaints management also includes establishing a positive error culture in the company.

Complaints can enter the company in different ways depending on the company. A complete collection of information is essential for problem-solving and the collected data is very relevant for the company to get information about the product and the customers. Immediate actions are then taken if they are possible. The potential immediate actions may be sending replacement products, refunding the purchase price or making improvements to the product, service. In some cases, companies may also need to initiate a production stop or product recall to prevent the problem from spreading.

Complaint management is a critical factor in companies. Employees who are confronted with complaints from customers may have to deal with emotional and frustrated customers. They have to manage several tasks in this situation: Reassure the customer and find an appropriate solution to the problem, represent the company in the best possible way, retain the customer and reduce the negative impact.

Especially in times of e-commerce, you cannot rely on customer loyalty. Free returns, short delivery times and a constantly available customer service are taken for granted by many customers today. Even for customers, making a complaint is not easy. Often, long waiting times, unfriendly service and costly bureaucracy can make this process more unpleasant than necessary for everyone involved. Complaints can be a potential source of conflict and stress for everyone involved. In our digitalized world, dissatisfied customers have the potential to do significant damage to the company's reputation. A few bad reviews in popular portals such as Google can make it difficult for companies to acquire new customers. This makes it all the more important to strive for a smooth process.

Many customers are forgiving of mistakes in products and services. Forgiving an unfriendly or inadequate handling of these errors is much more difficult for many customers.

The qmBase claim management is already the useful software-based support for numerous companies. In addition to the numerous advantages of our solution, such as worldwide accessibility, uniform data entry and the promotion of asynchronous work, the complaint management impresses with further advantages.

The app allows you to record all complaints in a standardized way and to adapt the information input to your requirements. The intuitive user interface enables uncomplicated processing of complaints, templates and guides for employees are a thing of the past. With each complaint, a clear responsibility, deadlines for processing as well as a cause of error and the costs are recorded. This data can then be used for automatic evaluation.

To make interrelationships in your company as transparent as possible, you can link complaints directly to the necessary measures. These content links create the necessary context for motivated and efficient processing.

A common tool in complaint management is the 8-D report. With this you can document the results of a problem solution. All the information for the various disciplines of an 8D report is available in Complaint Management. The complete 8D report can be created with a few clicks from the information contained, saved and exported as a PDF file.

If you would like to learn more about qmBase's complaint management, click here to arrange a webinar. By importing master data, we make it easier for you to get started with our software. All necessary customer and product data can be easily imported directly into the system via CSV.

So you are ready to go in just a few minutes.

Sources:

Björn H. Asdecker, Retourenmanagement im Versandhandel 

Doris Stempfle, Lothar Stempfle, Ricarda Zartmann Reklamationsmanagement als Reklame

Lukas Liem - Reklamationsmanagement 

t3n - Die Kundenloyalität ist tot, was tun?