You have received a negative online review. It is scathing, hard-hitting, and damaging. What do you do?
A lot of customer service representatives will run for the hills, but reputation management is crucial to any company. Handling customer complaints isn’t easy but it provides your business with a useful source of information.
Use Reputation Management to Assess Your Services
For every customer that complains, there are 26 who won’t say a thing. This means there could be 26 people who have had a problem with your company, and they will either be willing to give you another chance, or they won’t.
Therefore, the one customer that has gotten in touch with you is a valuable source of information. They are telling you where there’s a problem and how you can solve it. This gives you an insight into what likes and dislikes your customers have, and provides you with an outsider’s opinion of your business.
Build Trust by Resolving Their Complaints
Every complaint you receive needs facing head on, no matter how you feel about it. In order to build trust with your customers, you need to resolve their problems and respond to their issues quickly.
Not convinced?
Then you might be interested to know that 67% of customers can be retained if you resolve their complaint quickly and efficiently.
To handle these complaints, you need to apologize for what happened, try to explain why it happened, and offer a resolution to the issue.
Then, after your conversation with the customer, you need to take their feedback and analyze it. Where did the problem originate? Has this problem happened before? Is it just this one user who has been affected, or are there more?
Encouraging Engagement to Help Reputation Management
You might cringe at the thought of encouraging complaining customers to get in touch with you, but the only way to turn complaints into opportunities is to listen to this feedback. In fact, of the companies who are deemed “best in class” when it comes to customer service, 70% will use customer feedback. The industry average is 50%.
Handling customer complaints well will not only give you another chance with the customer in question, but it can also create further opportunities from their recommendations. Word of mouth is an incredibly powerful marketing tool, and will turn your customer complaints into great opportunities.
