Dealing with Customer Complaints – The ‘Act Now’ Policy
By Eric Gilboord
A business coach, when explaining to a group of entrepreneurs how to deal with a dissatisfied customer, asked how serious is the following customer complaint? (Add complaint here_________________.)
Answers ranged from an easy fix to unrecoverable. The coach replied the actual seriousness can be immaterial; it depends on how long you wait to deal with it. A ten dollar problem to one person can be as serious as a ten thousand dollar problem to someone else.
If I don’t respond for a few minutes that’s not really a problem. If I wait an hour, my customer will be somewhat angrier and less forgiving. If I wait a month I may not be able to recover and lose my customer altogether. In each case, it’s the same problem, but the longer I wait, the more serious it becomes.
And that’s why dealing with customer complaints ASAP is so important. If we wait we make the problem bigger and tougher to deal with. So before you just add the complaint to your To Do list or worse have no mechanism in place at your company to deal with it, make it an ‘act now’ policy. When a customer complains it is dealt with on the spot.
Don’t let small problems become large and much more difficult to resolve. Save your company hours of unnecessary work and devote that time to finding new even bigger and even better customers.
And that's According to Eric, A2E
By Eric Gilboord
A business coach, when explaining to a group of entrepreneurs how to deal with a dissatisfied customer, asked how serious is the following customer complaint? (Add complaint here_________________.)
Answers ranged from an easy fix to unrecoverable. The coach replied the actual seriousness can be immaterial; it depends on how long you wait to deal with it. A ten dollar problem to one person can be as serious as a ten thousand dollar problem to someone else.
If I don’t respond for a few minutes that’s not really a problem. If I wait an hour, my customer will be somewhat angrier and less forgiving. If I wait a month I may not be able to recover and lose my customer altogether. In each case, it’s the same problem, but the longer I wait, the more serious it becomes.
And that’s why dealing with customer complaints ASAP is so important. If we wait we make the problem bigger and tougher to deal with. So before you just add the complaint to your To Do list or worse have no mechanism in place at your company to deal with it, make it an ‘act now’ policy. When a customer complains it is dealt with on the spot.
Don’t let small problems become large and much more difficult to resolve. Save your company hours of unnecessary work and devote that time to finding new even bigger and even better customers.
And that's According to Eric, A2E
