It’s essential to know how to effectively respond to a customer’s complaint to keep them coming back for your product or services. You can take a couple of steps and measures to achieve an effective customer complaint response strategy.

1.Be Calm When Dealing with Negative Feedback

Staying calm while dealing with a customer is essential. The tone you use to talk to someone is the tone they’ll use back, so stay calm. It can be hard to remain calm when dealing with a complaint from the customer but staying relaxed shows the customer you care about solving their problem. Don’t lose your cool and get upset with a customer. Make sure you don’t yell at them or use harsh or inappropriate language. Approaching a situation or problem in a calm state allows you to think on your feet and effectively come up with a good solution.

2.Apologize and Empathize

It can be hard to apologize, especially when a customer is criticizing your product or service. Still, you have to forget any of your emotions while dealing with a customer and apologize. It doesn’t matter if the customer complaining is being rude. Apologizing to them will make the customer feel you’ve acknowledged they have a problem, and that you’re willing to solve it.

Make sure you listen to your customers and understand their problems. Making the customer feel like you’re listening to them reduces their chances of being rude or getting angry. As you listen to your customers’ issues, try to put yourself in their shoes and make them feel understood. Showing empathy to the customers’ problems is one of the most effective responses you can give a customer. Being empathetic forms a connection between you and your customer and makes it easy for both of you to resolve the problem with ease.

3.Ask Questions and Offer a Solution to Customer Complaints

Asking questions is a step taken to confirm all the facts in their complaints. Please don’t ask questions before customers finish explaining their problems. Allow them to vent all their distress first. Initiate a conversation making sure to stay still calm and show empathy in your dialogue. Ask the customer genuine questions that will allow you to solve their problem quickly and effectively. Don’t ask them questions they already answered while giving their complaint, as this might make them feel you were not paying attention to them.

After asking all the necessary questions, offer your customer a solution. If there’s a solution to solve their problem fully, take that solution. Even if there is no immediate solution to their problem, offer them an alternative option that will still leave them satisfied instead of giving no solution.

4.Execute the Solution Quickly

When choosing a solution, it’s crucial to select a solution that you can execute as per the company policies. However, leaving the customer satisfied is the ultimate goal here. After finding a reasonable solution that will leave both the customer and the company satisfied, the next step is to execute the solution and execute it fast so that both of you can get back to your regular schedules.

When solving a customer’s complaint, it’s good to go the extra mile to show them you value their time and investment in your company or product. Because of this, company employees should be able to make big decisions, especially when it comes to customer complaints in the absence of senior company officials. When you pass a customer up a chain of command, it gets tedious and can frustrate them to opt to walk out even before getting their solution, which should not happen.

5.Follow Up with Customers

The first four steps are essential, but this last step will put you ahead of your competitors. Following up on your customers after resolving their issues to find out if they were satisfied with the services they received is as important as any of the first four steps. You can do this by sending them a text message or an email.

Conclusion

An effective customer complaint response strategy will boost your services significantly by mending the relationship between your company and your customers. Following these five steps are a perfect guide to achieving great responses to your customers’ complaints.

If you have any questions or any more simple steps to an effective customer complaint response strategy, be sure to leave a comment below.

Author Bio:

Christine James believes that every customer has a voice. She is the Community Manager at HissingKitty.com (a customer complaints website) and loves talking to customers on social media about their challenges with Fortune 500 companies. Her work has been published on Huffington Post, Inc., SocialMediaToday, and Thought Catalog. Follow her on Twitter @hissingkittycom.

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