Your Surprising Superpower: Customer Complaints

You have a superpower that you might not even know about – the power of customer complaints.

How is an unhappy customer a superpower, you ask? Because they provide you with insight that’s the equivalent of reading your customers’ minds.

When you know what your customers are experiencing, thinking, and feeling, you can change the way you approach them. You can create more engaging marketing materials and your employees can be better prepared for sales conversations. You can uncover new market opportunities, and you can even make internal process changes that result in increased employee engagement and greater customer loyalty.

That is one potent superpower.

By listening and responding to customer complaints, you are getting unsolicited answers to these very important questions:

What’s the real problem?

You know there’s a problem. You know that some customers are unhappy- after all, no business is immune to issues. But by listening carefully to customer complaints, you can uncover what the actual problem is.

Then you can solve it for existing customers, and prevent it affecting future customers.

What exactly went wrong?

When you know what the problem is, you also need to uncover what exactly went wrong. What are your customers saying about this? How did their experience with your company go wrong?

Now you can determine:

_    If there is something you can change in your process or products that will prevent it from happening again

_    Where the communication gaps are

_    Where any retraining might need to happen within your organization

What can you do to improve satisfaction?

You can guess and make assumptions until you are blue in theface, but the best insights into what customers actually wantwill come from the customers themselves.

When you hear a customer complaint, take the opportunity toextend the conversation. Ask them not only what went wrong, but also what youcan do to make them happy. What more can you do to keep them as a customer, orbetter yet, turn them into advocates that refer their friends and family toyour products/services?

What can you do to create an excellent customer experience next time?

This is a question you should be asking every customer, notjust those that complain:

“What can we do to make your next experience with our companythe best you’ve ever had?”

With this one question, you will uncover information you couldnever have received any other way. This direct question gives the customer permission to tell you exactly what they want, and it will uncover valuableinsight.

What can your team do better?

Make sure you are not only listening to those customercomplaints, but also tracking and measuring them. This way, you can determinepossible improvements hidden in a good customer complaint. So, when customers speak up, make sure you’re listening and taking action.

When it comes to improving your customer feedback process,Questback has a solution that makes listening to customers easy, helping you achieve better customer insight.

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