Complaints are like medicine – it might not taste nice but makes you better in the end!
If we are ever faced with a disgruntled customer we see it as an opportunity not as a problem. Complaints let us know what is happening with our products and/or service, and like every business, our future depends on satisfied customers.
According to TARP (Technical Assistance Research Project) who research customer service, customers who complain and are subsequently satisfied are 8 per cent more loyal than if they had no problem at all.
We make sure that we follow some simple rules for handling any complaints we may receive:
- Listen to the complaint
- Thank the customer for bringing the issue to our attention
- Empathise with the customers difficulties (we keep it simple, concise, honest and humane)
- Accept responsibility
- Explain what action will be taken
- Follow through and meet our commitments
- Carry out regular reviews
If an organisation never has any complaints it’s probably a poor one as no one bothers to complain they just go elsewhere.
Our customers trust us and therefore will give us the opportunity to resolve their complaint, because they believe it’s an investment of emotion, time and money worth making. If they don’t trust us, that opportunity will probably be lost. Worse still, they may not tell us but they may tell 10, 20, 1000 or even 1,000,000 people (in todays digital world it just takes a tweet or a post!!!).
There’s always a lesson to be learnt from complaints for everyone especially if the focus is on the stories and not the stats. The stories will leave more of an imprint and are more likely to compel people to do better.
With a strong commitment to customer satisfaction we are proud to say we have reached an amazing target of 95% customer satisfaction to date, a continued improvement on last year of 93% and in 2015 89%.
Regular quality meetings are held to review the 5% less satisfied customers, chaired by the MD himself Rob Fay who states “Having the opportunity to deal with customer complaints before they even think about going anywhere else or using social media to voice their opinion is golden. We ensure that the principles outlined above are used to deal with any issues to the often higher than expected resolution of the customer. We then build on this learning curve to ensure we improve where we need to”