We all think we are doing a great job running our businesses. But are we doing as well as we think we are? I know personally that I almost always have the confidence that I am doing an excellent job at what I set out to do. But I also know that confidence persists even when concrete evidence seems to contradict it.

Does Your Business See It’s Customer Service Clearly?

Cognitive bias, the tendency for humans to see things the way that they want to and not the way that they really are, is a common idea in psychology. Having run (and shut down) several small local businesses I certainly have fallen prey to this problem more than once. And it appears to affect all of us from the scientist to the business person.

In thinking about customer complaints I was curious whether cognitive biases, like the Optimism bias or Overconfidence effect, influenced a small business’s view point and whether that might impact their ability or willingness to hear complaints and understand their benefit. Anecdotally I know that it affected me but I wanted to see if I could measure the effect more broadly.

What Small Business Owners Think vs. What Consumers Think

To answer a part of that question I performed a small experiment. Google Surveys gave me access to two distinct audiences; US adult Internet users (consumers) and a second, more specific group, small business owners and managers. I hypothesized that they would respond to some questions differently and that difference might reflect their specific bias.

I asked these two groups this same question:

What percentage of local merchants provide excellent service?

The consumers answered in a way that positioned their sentiment very close to the middle. On average (the mean), consumers estimated that ~56% of local businesses provided excellent service and that middle range (55%) was also their most common answer (the mode).

Small business owners and managers however shifted out of that mid range in their answers. For them, ~62% on average (the mean) of local merchants provided excellent service. However, more telling, their most frequent answer (the mode) was that 75% of local businesses provided excellent service.

Clearly this group of small business people felt that their peers, local merchants, offered excellence in service more often than their consumer counterparts.

The Danger Of Bias In Customer Service

Do small business owners (I include myself in that group) suffer from the bias of overestimation? Do small businesses owners think that they typically provide excellent service more often than consumers think they do?  It would appear so. While not conclusive my data certainly shows that business owners and consumers have a difference of opinion about local merchants in this regard.

Yet in that overestimation lies a danger when we hear a complaint. If we think we are excellent even when we may have failed, we are likely to be less receptive to legitimate criticisms and complaints. And less able to fix them without doing more harm.

It is safe to assume that we do in fact have these well documented biases and my contention is that we have to be aware of them particularly when dealing with complaints. We have to entertain as a real possibility, that we erred.

It will allow us to achieve better outcomes. In the case of business this means more profitability. And while it may occasionally mean “firing” a customer it usually means making things right when they go wrong.

But if we suffer from these subconscious biases how can we avoid their pitfalls so that when we get a valid customer complaint we can handle it properly?

Remain Open To Your Customers Point Of View

The solution? This article from the Harvard Business Review sums it up: because most of us tend to be highly overconfident in our estimates, it’s important to “nudge” ourselves to allow for risk and uncertainty.. They suggest the following steps:

• Think Twice
• Look at past failures (Premortem)
• Take an Outside View
• Think about objectives

These are much the same as the steps to resolving a complaint successfully. And if you can keep them in mind and entertain the idea that the customer may have a point, you and your business will be the better for it.

In an effort to understand how a business can better minimize the negative impact of consumer complaints and maximize the possible benefit of handling them well, GetFiveStars is conducting a number of consumer surveys to explore this issue.

In this survey question we asked a representative sample of U.S. consumers (n=499) an open ended question.

When dealing with a local merchant, what will cause you to complain?

We then categorized their responses into themes.

Roughly 20 themes emerged but only 8 really showed any frequency and of those only 2 themes were repeated over and over again.

Customer Service & Employee Behavior Causes The Most Complaints – 57%

Customer service (or a lack there of) and employees behaviors dominated their thoughts and clearly outpaced the other annoyances. This isn’t a surprise and these two are tightly if not completely intertwined.

Service issues represented 34% of the responses and employee attitudes or behavior accounted for 23% of the answers respectively.

Together these two areas together accounted for 57% of the total responses.

Low Product Quality, Speed & High Prices Combined for 21%

Low product quality, speed and high prices together garnered 21% of the mentions. These eight areas collectively accounted for 78% of the answers and obviously provide a framework for a business to start analyzing their processes to reduce the likelihood of these issues occurring.

When dealing with a local merchant, what will cause you to complain?

Of note to me and something that most businesses should take heed of is that pricing is way down the lists of complaints accounting for a mere 5% of the respondents. In the end, despite the fact that we fear we need to keep lowering our prices to keep our customers happy there are other fish to fry that are of much more importance to consumers.

Unhappy Customers Are Often Quiet & Don’t Return

Most consumers don’t express their complaints and will often just stop frequenting a business when dissatisfied. This in itself is all the more reason to proactively engage your customers in a feedback process.  And yet repeat customers are really the life blood of any business generating significantly more lifetime value and at a lower cost.

Understanding the pain points of your business is needed to outline a path to correction. If a local business can understand the most common areas of consumer pain, they can then work to minimize them.

Start Listening To Your Customers

I spent many years laboring in the trenches of a local bricks and mortar business. And during all that time and with millions of dollars of annual sales and thousands of customers I never once surveyed my customers to understand what we were doing wrong or could be doing better. One of the main reasons that I helped design GetFiveStars the way it is so that other local businesses would not make the same mistake.

Whether you use GetFiveStars or some other method, start asking your customers today. Find out where you might be falling short and fix it.

What happens when customers experience problems dealing with your company and when things go wrong? What customer behaviors can you expect when things just don’t go right and the customer leaves dissatisfied?

You would hope that most customers would speak up and communicate the problems that they experienced. Unfortunately that’s not what happens. Most of them will just remain quiet, you never know of their problems or dissatisfaction and they just stop doing business with you. Or worse.

Their bad customer experience is a secret to you, the business, the one who should know about it over anyone else.

The Bulk Of Unhappy Customers Are Silent

Some writers have suggested that as few as  4% of unhappy customers will speak up and that 90% of the disaffected will abandon you and your business without a word. Our recent research isn’t quite as stark as that. But our survey still showed that only about 1/3 of your unhappy customers will actually offer up a complaint of their own volition.

Regardless, it’s a definitive minority that will ever bother to speak up and it leaves 2/3, a true silent majority, ready to quit your business or even write a bad review online without you ever knowing.

Fortunately ~24% of your unhappy customers do in fact return, perhaps grudgingly, without detailing the complaint. They apparently are willing to give you another try and you have another chance to make them happy.

But over 40% of those who had a bad experience just never come back to your business again and never tell you directly what went wrong.  They are just gone. And, unfortunately,  as many as 1 in 8 (another 12.6%) of these unhappy customers say that they will not just abandon your business but will also head off and write you a bad review.

These are dark numbers that demonstrate how easy it is to lose customers and garner a bad review in the process. And depending on the lifetime value of your customers this can really impact your future growth prospects as not only will the bad review be visible to the world but each of the unhappy customers is likely to directly tell somewhere between 9 and 15 people of their bad experience.

Customer Complaints Give You A Chance, Silence Does Not

But there is some good news in the complaint arena. Surfacing these silent dissatisfied customers and bringing them to light can offer huge benefits.

How do you do that? You take the time, one way or another, to find out if your customers are satisfied and whether your company did a good job.  We created GetFiveStars to help businesses ask every customer about their experience, it’s simply that important.

And surprisingly, according to our survey, if you do ask your customers how their experience went, almost all of your unhappy customers will tell you.

But the real lining in the cloud of complaints is that if you do resolve their complaint the vast majority (74%) are either likely or very likely to continue to do business with you. And in doing so these “happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience”. They once again can become your “promoters” and share their good outcomes with their friends and family.

While complaints are never fun, you can see that they can be disastrous if left in the shadows. Its best to uncover them early and resolve them quickly. You will have happier customers, fewer bad reviews, more repeat business and best of all, better word of mouth to keep bringing you new customers.

As I noted earlier in this series: It costs a lot to replace a customer and it costs even more in lost business if their bad review is seen by hundreds or even thousands of readers. 

You love your business. It might even feel like your “baby”. So when a complaint comes in from a customer it can be devastating. And yet this painful experience of things going wrong, can actually be a huge blessing.

Instead of cringing and losing sleep next time you get a complaint, see it for what it is and use it to cement your bond with your customer and improve your business. There is gold in that complaint, lemonade in that lemon… you need to adjust your thinking so that you can see it and hear it and respond appropriately.

I know you are thinking “easy for him to say, he doesn’t have to listen to them”. I managed a bricks and mortar business with 50 employees for more than 20 years and during that time I got my fair share of complaints.

While I didn’t always succeed I did try to follow the advice that follows. And I still lost a fair bit of sleep. Trust me, it wasn’t worth it.

How can complaints actually be good for your business?

1- Most unhappy customers don’t complain they just don’t come back, ever.

When customers are unhappy with your service most (94%) will leave, say nothing and just not come back. A few (4%) will typically complain. Consider yourself lucky if they do complain instead of just abandoning you and your business. At least with a complaint you know that something went wrong and you can try to fix it for both this customer and future ones.

2- A complaint is a buying signal.

A complaint can be a buying signal that customer wants to continue to do business with you but is feeling so much pain they are not sure they can. The complaint is often a call for help so that they can maintain their relationship with you. It may feel like a personal attack but its really the customer attempting to reconcile their conflicting feelings.

3- A complaint is private, between just you and the customer.

Unlike a bad review, its not something that the world can see. Its impact is limited. How you handle it will dictate whether you keep the customer or whether you get that bad review. Most consumers do not default to writing a bad review when their shopping experience goes wrong.

In fact it would appear that most customers usually only write bad reviews after things went very, very wrong. Despite their bringing the issues to the businesses’ attention, often multiple times, no solutions were offered.

4- A complaint, if successfully resolved, will retain the customer 70% of the time.

Acquiring a new customer is expensive (up to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one) and most of your sales come from your existing customers not new ones. If you handle the complaint well, not only will you keep the customer you will avoid that bad review. The willingness of 70% of customers to continue to do business with you after a complaint is resolved makes for a compelling ROI and makes it worth your while to solve the problem.

5- A complaint is a way to learn what needs to be improved

A complaint reflects a failure of some sort either in your business processes or in setting expectations of the customers. A careful examination of the causes can really help you improve and hopefully avoid the situation in the future.

There is a saying that what doesn’t kill you makes you better. Complaints are much like that. The trick is to be better with that customer rather than without them. As Earl Netwal has said Complaints are the raw material out of which a better business is built.

If you can intervene early with the customer, intervene with integrity and intervene with a true desire to learn and resolve the problem you can not only help your business be better but you can keep that customer.

When approached with an open mind, customer complaints are actually an opportunity to improve your customer experience and boost your business. 

In the best-case scenario, your customer may even have a more positive view of your business after a complaint is resolved than before they even had an issue.

In this article, you’ll learn where and why customers are most likely to complain, how you should handle customer complaints, and how to best support your employees. 

What Are Customer Complaints?

Customer complaints demonstrate that there’s a mismatch between the product or service delivered and the customer’s initial expectations. 

When complaints are one-off occurrences or mistakes, they can be interpreted as negative feedback and the relationship between the business and customer can usually be salvaged. When they’re consistent trends they need to be addressed at a more fundamental level, which we’ll cover later in this guide.

This conflict in expectations and results can be down to several different reasons: 

• Scenarios that are outside your control. Sometimes things go wrong and they have nothing to do with your business or its offering. For example, if you own a local fresh fruit and vegetable grocery store that offers a local delivery service, poor weather conditions could result in delayed or canceled grocery deliveries, leading to an uptick in customer complaints.

Here’s an example of a complaint regarding a late food delivery made by a local pizza store:

• Unreasonable expectations that are hard to meet. Occasionally customers have a long list of demands that are difficult for any business to meet. They may have unreasonable expectations regarding pricing, the level of service, or they may have misunderstood the product’s purpose.

This customer seems to have mismatched expectations with the service on offer which could probably have been resolved with clearer communication at the start: 

• Misleading marketing around the business’s offering. When businesses misrepresent their products or services through their marketing and social media campaigns, customers may feel that they’ve signed up for something that doesn’t exist. 

This customer understood from the website that this pest control business offered a bed bug sniffing dog and was disappointed when the reality of the service was different:

• Operational failures. Sometimes businesses may have a great product or service but fall down when it comes to the operational side. For instance, businesses that don’t train their staff properly or who use poorly implemented tech systems are more likely to receive customer complaints.

• Mistakes happen. We’re only human and sometimes a business may mess up its customer service, or provide a poor quality product. When this happens, a representative of your business should always hold up their hands and admit to getting it wrong and provide a customer-approved solution.  

In this situation, it would be best for someone from the business to contact the dissatisfied customer and provide a solution:

Where Are Customers Most Likely to Complain? 

Depending on your business model and location, customers may have multiple options for lodging a complaint.  Customer feedback can appear in two different ways, public and private. Naturally, if you’re providing channels for private negative feedback you’re more likely to be able to handle these issues outside of the public eye. 

Here are some of the top ways customers usually choose to complain: 

• Frontline staff. If you own a customer-facing business like a grocery store, delivery service, or gym, your customers may be more likely to complain in-person to a staff member who happens to be on duty.

• Customer satisfaction surveys. If you send out regular customer satisfaction surveys and leave space for customers to leave feedback, they may use it as an opportunity to share complaints about your business’s offering.

• Online reviews. Sometimes dissatisfied customers will use 3rd party review sites for complaining about your business. If you do receive online negative reviews, remember to acknowledge them and empathize with your customers. Check out our guide to replying to positive and negative reviews. 

Take a look at this negative Google review of a florist business: 

• Over the phone or via email. Businesses that provide a more personalized service to a smaller group of customers, may receive more complaints directly to their phone lines or email.

• Social media. Increasingly, customers are choosing to leave negative comments on business’ social media profiles. Twitter may be the most popular way for customers to complain, but it’s not uncommon to see negative comments on Instagram and Facebook profiles. 

Take a look at this Facebook comment left by a customer of Ikea: 

What Do Customers Typically Complain About? 

Regardless of industry, all businesses receive customer complaints at some point. Whether it’s as a result of a mistake made or due to an obstacle your customers have hit, there are certain scenarios that tend to provoke customer complaints. 

Having an awareness of what your customers typically complain about will not only help you improve your business’s offering but also help your employees prepare for handling common complaints.

Making an effort to consistently collect feedback from customers will allow you to stay on top of common complaints so you can improve your business and set your employees up for success in handling those complaints as they appear. 

Slow Customer Service 

Customers appreciate efficient customer service. Whether you run a restaurant or a plumbing business, customers like to feel that their time is respected. People live busy lives and can’t afford to waste time waiting in lines or on the phone. 

Long wait times indicate that your business doesn’t prioritize customer experience and that you may not have enough staff members to efficiently deal with your customers. 

Solution:

1. Train your staff to communicate with customers when wait times exceed expectations.
2. Evaluate your operations and try to adjust supply lines, processes, or signage to pre-emptively address potential bottlenecks.

Out of Stock Product or Unavailable Service

While an out-of-stock product or fully-booked service is usually an indication that your business is doing something right, customers can grow impatient and frustrated if there’s no availability for a long time. 

Customers may keep calling and emailing your business for updates about these unavailable services and products. Ultimately they may leave you negative feedback either online or in-person. 

Solution: 

1. Train your staff to apologize to customers for the inconvenience of not having the product or service they were looking for.
2. Set realistic expectations by being honest about when you next expect to have these products or services available. 

Low-Quality Product or Service

When products are sold damaged or they break shortly after purchase, you can expect customers to complain. 

For instance, if you run a local organic fresh fruit and vegetable shop, and a customer purchases bruised oranges, you can expect them to complain.

Take a look at this complaint about expired produce that’s been published on Google for the world to see:

Alternatively, if you run a catering company and the team shows up half an hour late to a birthday party, you can bet that the customer will be unhappy and complain to the lead organizer. 

Solution: 

1. Acknowledge that the product or service was below your business’s usual high standards. 
2. Identify a suitable solution, whether that’s a refund, store credit or a replacement product or service.
3. Check-in with your customers to see if they are satisfied with the solution.

No Resolution 

If a customer has already complained about unsatisfactory service or a poor product, they’ll expect some sort of resolution within the days and weeks after the initial complaint. 

Take a look at this customer’s frustration at never receiving a resolution, ultimately they took their business elsewhere to a competitor: : 

When customers receive a satisfactory solution they’re more likely to feel positive about your business overall. But when customers lodge a legitimate complaint and they don’t receive any kind of suitable solution, they may feel doubly frustrated and lodge a second complaint. 

Solution: 

1. Apologize for the slow response and explain that the team was searching for a suitable solution. 
2. Clearly communicate the expected timeline for follow-up communication and the final resolution. 

No Follow-up

Customers who have time-sensitive requests or complaints may feel anxious about you finding a solution and will want consistent updates. 

Other customers may be more patient though and not expect a regular stream of communication. The best policy is for the staff member who’s handling the complaint to be upfront about expected response times and then stick to them.  No follow-up is always going to be unacceptable. When a follow-up doesn’t happen, it could be a result of a few occurrences: 

• The team member handling the complaint forgot to follow up.
• Staff were overwhelmed with requests and couldn’t handle all the customer complaints simultaneously. 
• A tech solution failed – for example, your automated reminders never came through.

Complaint follow-up best practices: 

1. It’s ok not to have the solution right away. Always communicate with the customer that you are actively trying to solve the issue. 
2. Set customer expectations by providing a realistic timeline for resolution. If you know it will take a few days to resolve the problem, don’t promise a solution for the next day. 
3. Think about the channel through which the customer made the complaint and the acceptable response time. 24 hours is acceptable for a negative online review or an email, but a few hours or less is generally expected for in-person or phone complaint
4. If a complaint is time-sensitive, reassure customers by providing a few regular updates.

How Should Local Businesses Handle Complaints?

If your business can understand the cause of the problem, resolve the issue, and effectively communicate to the customer throughout, you may be able to turn complaining customers into loyal advocates of your brand. 

1. Make it Easy for Customers to Complain

If a customer needs to share negative feedback about your product or service, having to bend over backward to the business’s complaint procedure will only further annoy an already agitated customer. 

To help create a solid customer experience, customers need to feel that the business cares about their thoughts. When customers complain, it should be easy for them to share their honest opinions and thoughts with a business. 

Businesses need to provide customers with multiple avenues for them to share their thoughts. 

You could encourage customers to share their thoughts by:

• Putting a form on your website to encourage feedback and complaints.
• Posting a feedback link in your newsletter, social media platforms, and in-store.
• Actively ask your customers for their opinions.

Here’s an example of helping customers easily leave feedback on a business website:

Proactively asking your customers for honest feedback is a great way of preventing complaints from escalating. Sending out customer satisfaction surveys at regular intervals is one way of checking in with your customers and seeing how they feel about your business. 

Learn how to create effective customer satisfaction surveys and try some of our sample questions. 

2. Use it as an Opportunity for Uncovering Valuable Insights

Customer complaints provide useful insights into what may not be working for your business. When customers complain, ask valid questions to dig deeper into what caused the issue in the first place. 

When registering a complaint, consider asking customers the following questions:

• Could you elaborate on that point more? 
• Could you clarify what you mean by that?
• Could you provide me with an example?

Customer complaints are also a good time for some self-reflection. 

Ask yourself:

• Am I making any assumptions about the customer or complaint?
• Do I need any further details? 
• Why is this complaint significant for my business? 

Asking the right questions will help you uncover the root of the problem and how you might be able to resolve it. Depending on how your business is structured, you may choose a designated team member to handle complaints and uncover insights. For instance, in a local grocery store, it may make sense for the team manager to take charge of customer complaints. 

Alternatively, if you run a pest control service, it may be best for the bookings manager to handle customer complaints since they may have the most customer contact. Your bookings manager or receptionist would then need to report these insights to the manager or owner on a monthly or quarterly basis.

3. Respond Efficiently and Proactively

Acceptable response times depend on the nature of the complaint. Customers who leave negative feedback about your restaurant’s new seasonal menu may not mind if you take all day to respond. 

But a customer who calls to complain about a plumber who was meant to show up 5 hours ago is going to be more than frustrated if you take a week to respond. 

Take a look at this prompt same-day review response:

Keep in mind these complaint response best practices: 

• Respond promptly. Our survey shows over 55% of consumers expect a business to reply to a review within 1 day and over 30% expect a response within 3 days. Negative feedback requires a swift reply and resolution to show care and action from your business.

• If the feedback is public, respond publicly. It’s an opportunity to show future customers you’re capable and willing to right a wrong.

• Read through the complaint thoroughly. Use the customer’s own words to personalize your reply.

• Offer a solution.  Showing empathy for the situation and being respectful is vital to successful response management, but a solution is at the core of what the customer wants. Always provide a solution that’s appropriate to the complaint, whether that be compensation, a refund, or replacement. 

• Put the right person in charge. Make sure that the person replying to negative reviews has the authority to offer solutions.

Taking time to regularly monitor your customer complaints is important to ensure you don’t miss one. Set up GatherUp’s customer activity dashboard to stay on top of customer feedback and better manage customer experience. You could set up notifications for negative feedback so you don’t risk missing it. 

4. Identify a Suitable Solution and Follow up to See if You Solved Their Problem

Once you’ve found the cause of the customer complaint, identified a suitable solution, and proposed that solution to the customer, make you follow up to see if you successfully solved their problem. 

This response to a negative review identifies an opportunity to provide a solution in the form of a refund: 

Customers appreciate businesses that care about their experience and their overall satisfaction. 

You can then follow up with customers by: 

• Asking them if there’s anything else you can do to help them.
• Simply asking if the solution worked out for them. 

5. Record the Complaint and Analyze Patterns

When you receive a complaint, it’s important to record the type of complaint and who it came from. 

The complaint could come from: 

• A regular customer 
• A one-off customer
• A high-value customer 

If you receive multiple complaints about the same issue from a similar type of customer point, then it’s clear there’s a recurring problem.

It’s important to identify high-volume complaints as these can point to dominant issues throughout your business. 

Using GatherUp’s advanced reporting features you could filter, sort, customize and compare different complaints, and feedback. When you correctly identify repeat complaints and take steps to change the narrative, it’ll become easier to resolve recurring issues. 

How Can You Support Your Employees to Properly Handle Complaints? 

Business managers need to provide employees with proper guidance to ensure they feel well equipped and empowered to effectively resolve complaints on the business’s behalf. 

Clear guidance and policies will also help ensure each customer complaint receives a standardized level of attention and those complaints are recorded properly. 

Create a Clearly Written Complaint Handling Document

Write a set of guidelines that clearly outline how employees should deal with customer complaints. It’s a good idea to make the document as comprehensive as possible so employees feel confident in a range of different situations. 

As we mentioned earlier, if you’re consistently collecting feedback, you should be familiar with common customer complaints and have a specific way for your employees to be able to handle them. That way, they’ll understand what’s expected of them as the complaints arise. 

Try to provide guidance on how they should react, how to escalate the complaint, and provide possible solutions.  

Make sure the complaint-handling document is circulated throughout your business and easily accessible to all staff members. After reading the document, team members should hopefully feel confident making their own judgment calls and handling different situations. 

Give Your Staff Tools to Resolve Different Types of Complaints

In-person or virtual training sessions are an interactive way of helping employees feel confident in handling complaints. You could try incorporating role-play sessions where you show employees the potential set of complaints that customers could present. 

Reevaluate Your Business’s Complaint Handling

Handling customer complaints is one of the more challenging aspects of working in a customer-facing role. Remember to check in on your employees on a quarterly basis to see how they’re holding up in these situations. If your employees don’t feel well-equipped, it’s important that steps are taken at a managerial level to provide more tools and training sessions.

Final Thoughts

Customer complaints are a reality of running a business. When handled correctly though they’re an opportunity to improve customer experience and enhance your business’s offering. 

Make it a priority to work on the issues customers complain about, and proactively improve the way your business deals with negative feedback. Try implementing a few of our suggestions for handling complaints and see how you can retain more loyal customers. 

Related reading: 

• What Is Customer Experience and Why Is it Important? 
• Tracking What Your Customers Care About – Insights Turn Into Survey Questions
• The Power Of A Customer Experience Hub
• Reviews & Your Business: Developing Your Review Strategy

“Complaints are the raw mater out of which a better business is built.”* While this statement is true, it might only carry real weight if you don’t leave complaints to chance.

Allan Kaplan of Kaplan Insurance Agency is in an incredibly competitive & crowded insurance market just north of New York City. But for him customer service is a top priority and in fact Kaplan Insurance maintains a Net Promoter Score (his word of mouth index) score in the 90’s, one of the highest we have seen in his industry class.

In the insurance industry an independent agency like Kaplan sells the insurance but does none of the billing or claim adjustment. The national insurer bills it, a third party does the accident appraisal and a different division of national does claim reimbursement.

But the customer may have had a terrible customer service experience along the way and Allan doesn’t usually hear from the customer until renewal time when the customer is already lost to him.

In his case complaints could be caused by people or processes totally out of his control and he would never have known and subsequently lost the client. After he implemented GetFiveStars and he started encouraging feedback, he seemed to be “doing complaints right” so we interviewed him to learn more about how he was so successful.

We took his ideas and few more to come up with this check list for your business.

For Allen, and we think most businesses, complaint resolution creates loyal customers, prevents bad reviews and provides critical intelligence you need to improve your business. All of these lead to a better bottom line.

If that is the case, and I believe that it is, every business needs to be ready, willing and able to accept complaints and handle them professionally.

Here are list of ideas that we have put together that help make your business more complaint friendly:

Be ready to handle complaints

• Recognize your biases and think about how you will overcome them
• Have a plan that is written and followed
• Be ready for that moment of misery and don’t fall prey to your emotions

Make it easy to complain

• Make a preferred complaint channel easy and obvious to your customers
  • Post an SMS/text number readily visible in-store that you monitor
  • Put a form on your website to encourage feedback and complaint
  • Post your feedback link in your newsletter, email, on your receipt & in-store
• Listen on all channels including Facebook, Twitter, Messenger and anywhere else you might be mentioned
• Actively solicit feedback
  • Survey you customers regularly by email and ask how they are doing (Use GetFiveStars!)

Welcome complaints when they do come

• Lead by example and be sure that you role model optimal behavior for your staff and co-workers
• Make a complainer feel like your most valued customer because in some ways they are  (Maybe give Hug Your Haters a read to understand this idea further)

Resolve complaints quickly

• Empower employees to act on your behalf
• Quick responses and quicker action will be perceived as caring

Handling a complaint should be a well thought out and efficient process just like your sales process already is. If you are proactive rather than reactive and anticipate the coming complaint you can make the absolute best of a bad situation.

Do you have a complaint plan in place? How do you handle complaints? Let us know.

You can read or watch more about Allen and his agency in this customer spotlight.

* h/t to Earl Netwal for this great quote.