To manage the service effectively, there are 3 steps that must be followed when faced with a customer complaint. I explain in this article why this circle should be closed and thus achieve the improvement of the service.
Customer complaints, a topic widely discussed in relation to service management. However, a tool that is rarely used effectively.
By "effectiveness" I mean the ability of claims to improve service. If a claim only serves to carry a statistic that tells me how good or how bad my service is, I am wasting a huge advantage of this information.
In effective service management, the claim is a powerful and low-cost tool that should not be lost sight of.
Conducting market research is often very expensive. However, the claim comes as "free information" from customers.
An important clarification: it is not advisable to just rely on this source of information, since it is only "the tip of the iceberg" of customers. These are those who have been dissatisfied and, within them, those who have decided to express it (which is usually only 4% of dissatisfied customers).
But when service management is not well developed, this can be a very good start. So what to take into account so that this information helps to improve the service?
The 3 conditions to manage the service from customer complaints
There are 3 consecutive steps that must be completed for this to be successful. They are:
1. Collect complaints
2. Analyze them
3. Give feedback to employees who can correct the problem
Here we have to distinguish between two different objectives:
• Satisfy the customer who complained.
• Improve the service so that other customers do not have the same cause of dissatisfaction.
A short-term goal, and a long-term goal. Service management must understand both.
An experience that illustrates the case:
Faced with a problem in a service that bothered me a lot, I requested the complaints book. When I opened it, I was surprised by the amount of claims turned over there in a short time. I asked the employee who gave it to me, who read these claims and how often, to which she replied that the manager did it, approximately every 2 days.
I then wrote my complaint, which ended in a call for action to the company, to contact me as proof that they cared about improving the service (indirectly, I wanted to check if someone was reading the complaints). It has been more than a week since this fact, and I did not receive any contact.
Note that the system implemented by this company only fulfills step 1: Collect complaints.
Obviously the analysis is absent, much less the feedback to the employees to solve the problem.
The problem is that if this circle is not closed, fulfilling the 3 steps, the only thing that is generated is a waste of resources. In addition, a new expectation is fed to the client, since by giving him an avenue to express himself, he expects someone to do something with his dissatisfaction.
So how do you go about meeting the 3 steps?
Service management requires systems. Otherwise, progress regresses in a short time.
It is not enough for the manager to review the claims a few times. The frequency, the person responsible for doing it, and the information that must be transmitted as a result of its analysis must be pre-designed and it must be possible to verify.
In short, the manager (or whoever is responsible for doing it) must set this activity on their agenda and demonstrate results. If you want to manage the service to improve it, you have to take contact with the customer and the interpretation of their expectations very seriously. Otherwise, the service management does not exist.
