Whatever complaint-handling policy your company has in place, it should be easy to understand, simple to implement, and effectively communicated to all staff. After all, what good is a formal policy if your customer service staff is unaware of it?

What To Include in Your Complaint Policy

Some of the key features of a good customer-complaint-handling policy include:

• Mechanisms for people to complain

• A system for logging and analyzing complaints

• Identification of those who will be responsible

• Procedures for handling different levels of complaint

• Ways of keeping customers informed

• A structure of compensations

• Follow-up action plan

Receiving Information from Customers

There is no point having a policy to handle unhappy customers if such customers are not encouraged to come forward in the first place. Such an invitation to comment or complain can take the form of something impersonal written on the packaging, such as, "Customers who are not entirely satisfied with this product should . . . (action)."

The complaint venue could also be something very personal, following the example of the chairman of a major food chain, who prints his own phone number on the packaging of products!

Questionnaires, comment cards, suggestion boxes, exit surveys, and market research are all positive ways of encouraging customer feedback .

Informal verbal feedback from talking to customers is often the most valuable of all. However, in the industries where I have the most experience, i.e., information technology, telecommunications and finance, I have always insisted on regular formal account reviews.

Logging and Analyzing Complaints

It is essential to have a system in place that collates and considers the nature of a complaint if corrective action is to be taken, in order to prevent a recurrence.

To do this, it is important to realize just what your company considers a "complaint":

• Is it solely when someone gets angry?

• Is it when a customer mildly points out an error?

• Is it when customers are deliberately trying to be awkward?

Not everything that goes wrong warrants a formal complaint or a formal complaint-handling process. For example, a certain number of faults with machinery is to be expected.

Logging Customer Complaints (continued...)

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