How To Handle Customer Complaints
By Ben Stephens

Customer complaints aren’t software bugs or poor customer satisfaction survey results. Software bugs are clearly quality issues with the product. Poor customer sat scores on event surveys are typically about a specific service event. (Although issues identified in event surveys may be symptoms of larger, more pervasive problems within the organization and should be carefully scrutinized.) Customer complaints are typically general in nature and relate to some barrier to service or process failure within the customer organization. When customers complain, they’re asking you to listen and address their concerns. To accomplish this, you need a well-developed complaint process to consistently capture and address customer complaints.

A formalized complaint process usually has five components:

Identification -- Complaints first need to be defined. To do that, staff members must be trained to recognize complaints, provide the initial expectation management, and initiate the complaint process. It’s important that staff members handle complaints in a consistent manner. Some complaints may not require significant effort to resolve, but they should be identified and tracked nonetheless. Some will point out process or organizational problems that may require serious effort to resolve.

Capture -- Complaints should be documented and recorded so they can be consistently processed, managed, and reported. Many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide excellent environments for tracking customer complaints. They provide the ability to log complaints, link them to customers, track status updates, and integrate them into escalation or account management processes.

Process -- Once captured, customer complaints should be processed much like a support case. However, complaints frequently require a separate focus and therefore should have an owner to ensure that they’re processed consistently. Roles and responsibilities should also be developed for the complaint handling process role. This drives consistency and ensures that complaints are handled properly. It also provides a means for communicating the responsibilities and importance of managing customer complaints to the organization.

The complaint process should include a classification system, severity, customer update conventions, escalation guidelines, and a defined life cycle that includes status and closure rules. Complaint processing should be documented and included as a component of the support center documentation. The process should include a root cause process to analyze customer complaints, especially those originating outside the support organization. Staff should receive training in the process and process metrics developed to monitor process effectiveness. Other organizations should also be informed of the complaint process to ensure their commitment and involvement in the process. The development, distribution, training, and marketing organizations should be active involved in the complaint process.

Quality Improvement -- The complaint process should have some method to drive improvement. This doesn’t mean that a survey process is necessary, but clearly, improvements in the process need to be driven by the process owner, through customer and complaint process participant feedback.

Analysis – Complaints should be reviewed and analyzed on a regular basis. This should include a reporting component that outlines the volume and key metrics concerning complaints. Metrics could include, ratios of complaints to customers, percent of complaining customers, top categories of complaints, complaint find rates, complaints from new complainers, open complaint aging, and other reports. Trend analysis should be used to develop an understanding of complaint metrics and their relationship over time and to other service metrics.

About the Author
Ben Stephens is a Senior Support Center Practices auditor and consultant and has conducted SCP audits in North America and internationally for the past five years. For more information about the Support Center Practice program, visit the SCP web site at www.scpcertification.com or contact Ben directly at bstephens@servicestrategies.com.