Many customer service employees experience complaints and negative feedback as threats to their self-esteem. It’s easy to see how many service providers respond negatively to threats such as “I’m never doing business with your company again.”
But suppose the service provider focuses on how to diffuse the exchange instead of allowing emotions to take charge? In that case, the negative chain of dissatisfaction has a chance to be broken.
Well-handled complaints are a mechanism that can help organizations
- Build agility: responding quickly to problems that need to be fixed
- Develop trust: acknowledging when a mistake has been made and taking responsibility for it
- Show empathy: expressing care for customers when they have issues with products and services
Customer service representatives (CSRs) need to learn how best to respond without becoming overwhelmed, while using complaints as opportunities to deepen customer relationships.
How do CSRs become complaint-handling superstars and respond in a way that keeps customer relationships while not becoming burned out in this type of work?
Superstar complaint handlers all share common attributes, including:
- They don’t let negative feedback threaten their self-esteem. If the customer’s situation gets out of hand, they let it go when the conversation has ended. This is how most sports players do it. They let go of the last mistake or attack on them and move on. Otherwise, they’re still thinking about the aggressive player who elbowed them instead of paying attention to the next basket they can make.
- They view complaint handling as problem solving. Sometimes these problems are very convoluted and it can be difficult to determine what happened – and what’s the best way to satisfy the customer. They also understand that they won’t achieve 100 percent satisfaction.
- They constantly work to hone their communication skills. Superstars recognize that several communication skills are part of effective complaint handling. These include top-notch listening skills, probing questioning skills, reading body language, and managing customers who lose self-control when complaining.
- They put themselves in the customer’s shoes. Exceptional CSRs ask themselves what they’d be thinking and feeling if whatever the customer is complaining about happened to them. They consider what they would expect in order to walk away and feel good about the complaint. They are able to demonstrate empathy by apologizing with sincerity. A simple “Sorry, there’s nothing I can do” isn’t an apology that means much.
- They take on the role of the customers’ partner. Superstar complaint handlers use a lot of powerful phrases that signify they are in partnership with customers and understand what the customers are dealing with. They talk about “we” rather than “you” – “We’ll do this together” instead of “Here’s what you have to do.”
Superstar complaint handlers can move customers from frustration to satisfaction. They realize that, when complaints are handled well, they transform into experiences more positively remembered than if no complaint has been made in the first place.
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