CHAPTER THREE

The 9 most common customer complaints — and how to inspire excellent customer service

Every customer communication is an opportunity for your business to look great. In a world of instant mass communications via social media, the word can travel fast if your service is excellent — or particularly bad.

Whether your customer communications are largely automated or handled personally, the most critical elements are responsiveness, timeliness and good manners. Sounds like common sense, right? But just a few years ago, the Synovate Retail Performance How Do We Shop survey found that in Australia, rude, pushy, or lazy staff were spoiling the experience for nearly 70 per cent of respondents.

It should go without saying that businesses should sell quality products that meet customer expectations, but a survey by KANA found that customers in several countries spend an average of close to ten days per year on hold for customer service and another two days per year complaining about bad products.

Great customer service improves your reputation, wins repeat business and increases future sales. Done badly, it drives customers crazy, drives your business to the competition and may even land you in court. It’s impossible to quantify the lost future sales from upsetting one customer — but it’s fairly easy to predict what will happen if you upset most of them.

No matter what your industry or the size of your business, you can avoid the nine most common complaints with a few simple tactics. The solutions may not be obvious to everyone, but they are easy.

Under-trained staff

Customers say:

They’re getting the run-around by staff who don’t know enough to be of help. They wonder whether the business knows what it’s doing.

The business consequences:

Under-trained employees increase the business’s service effort and wastes money. A deluge of unresolved complaints overloads staff. As the downward spiral continues, future business is lost as customers use social media to tell their friends and colleagues to buy elsewhere.

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Solutions:

Keep your team and your customers well informed. Ask experienced staff to document the most common client requests and their resolutions for the rest of the team. Product user guides and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) help prevent staff from having to answer the same questions over, and over, and over.

Make the product documentation and FAQ easy to find, for both staff and customers. If customers can’t find it, they’ll keep calling and asking the same questions. If staff can’t find it, newer employees will struggle to solve common problems. The most likely place to publish FAQs is on your public website. It should be in an obvious location, and downloadable in PDF format.

Train the team on the products or services. Ask experienced team members to train newer ones. Consider using role-play training, where each team member gets to play the role of the client as well as that of the service rep. Although this may seem awkward at first, a charismatic team member can make it fun. Don’t allow team members to criticise one another in front of their peers; rather, they should offer only constructive suggestions.

Keep the training materials and documentation current. For larger businesses, an experienced employee is often the best person for the job. Delegate face-to-face training to a senior team member and encourage team participation. Allocate sufficient time for the team member to do the extra work. Unless you’re paying them extra, don’t expect them to develop training material and documentation in between calls or after hours.

Bad manners

Customers say:

They’re held hostage by pushy staff who keep talking and won’t take no for an answer. Or worse, the staff treats them in a rude or condescending manner.

The business consequences:

Bad manners can turn any minor issue into a major one. Customers who feel negative about a purchase are highly likely to regret the purchase or return the product. Excessive service calls, order cancellations and returns all waste staff time and wages. Lack of faith in the product lowers product reviews, ratings and sales. Also it lowers staff morale, making it harder for them to treat customers well. *

Solutions:

Identify the source. If the entire team is being rude to customers, ask why and be prepared to listen. You could have a private conversation with an experienced team member, or run an anonymous survey among staff to get honest, unfiltered answers from everyone.

If staff believe customers are stupid, fix that up smart quick. Customers pay everyone’s wages. Discourage staff from complaining about clients, unless they’re identifying a problem and offering a solution. Customers should be treated with respect at all times.

If management believes staff are stupid, fix that up smart quick. If you don’t respect your customer-facing staff, how can you expect them to respect your customers?

Put yourself in their shoes. If staff are being pushy, the underlying issue could be unrealistic expectations from management or general job satisfaction — so be prepared to fix these things if you can. Usually it’s not about the money: the number one reason people quit jobs is because they feel unappreciated or powerless to do their job well. If you’re a manager, try doing their job for a day under the supervision of a senior team member.

Don’t be old-school. It’s incredible that so many businesses still use tricks and hard-sell tactics that drive customers away. Most customers born from 1970 onward won’t have a bar of it. More on this later.

Encourage staff to suggest solutions to any problems with customer interactions. This empowers the team to improve.

Inaccessibility

Customers say:

You’re not reachable when they need you.

The Business Consequences:

Today’s customers expect to reach you through multiple channels, 24 hours a day. When they can’t contact you conveniently in their own time, many customers take their business to a more convenient provider.

Solutions:

Customers expect 24/ 7 communication. But having round-the-clock communication doesn’t equal employing round-the-clock staff or answering your phone at all hours. Successful businesses make it easy to purchase and manage products and services online, and their websites help customers help themselves. The basic principle even applies to the smallest of businesses — queries can be handled via email at any hour — all you need to do is respond.

The technology isn’t rocket science. A good website and a simple online query form can do the trick for a small or medium-sized business. If you have many customers, automated inquiry acknowledgements and reference numbers, web-based FAQs and current, findable product documentation ease the pressure on staff. With some or all of these in place, customers can resolve common issues without assistance.

Design your website to help customers, both prospective and current. If it’s not important to a customer, consider putting it on a less prominent page, or removing it altogether. The site should be simple to use and easily navigable. It’s worth noting that structurally complicated sites can cause lower rankings by search engines — so a simpler site makes your business more findable.

Avoid the DIY website. To implement round-the-clock customer service online, your website should be designed and maintained by a professional. Don’t have it done on the cheap by someone’s friend who ‘does web stuff’. Host the site at a reliable provider who guarantees uptime, not on a web server in the friend’s home. A $900 website that confuses customers costs far more than a $9,000 site that helps customers while you sleep.

Unresponsiveness

Customers say:

They can’t stand wasting time on hold, or waiting for service while staff are performing other tasks.

The business consequences:

It goes without saying that ignoring or angering your customers is bad for business. For phone-based customer service, there’s nothing that drives business away like excessive average hold times. Customer attrition increases, and future sales are lost as the word spreads. Team morale and job satisfaction suffers as customers take anger out on staff. Employee turnover increases.

For face-to-face service, a paucity of staff (or staff members engaged in other tasks) will drive customers out the door fast. There’s no way of measuring how much the customer would have purchased that day, spent over a lifetime, or recommended to their friends, had a staff member offered help, or at least said, “I’ll be right with you”.

Solutions:

Customer service should take priority. When customer service staff are required to do other tasks, they’re not entirely focused on helping customers. In a storefront, customer-facing staff should never be required to take phone calls whilst assisting a customer. This sends a clear message: “Whoever’s on the phone is more important than you.”

If you’re understaffed, don’t make it the problem of customer-facing staff. If you do, it will quickly become a problem for your customers. People like to do what they’re good at, so let customer-facing staff help customers, and hire others to do the other tasks. Happier employees are more loyal, so you won’t need to train new employees as often. Also, you’ll secure more repeat business from impressed customers.

Unresolved issues:

Customers say:

They’ve explained the same issue multiple times (via phone, email, chat, online inquiry form) and still no one’s fixed the problem.

The business consequences:

It costs far more to win a new customer than to retain a current one. An unresolved customer inquiry pretty much guarantees that customer won’t come back.

Solutions:

Document how to resolve the most common customer issues. Document the most common requests, the procedure for resolving each request, and how long each issue should take to resolve. Make sure the customer-facing staff know where to find this documentation.

Let staff ask for help with difficult issues. Customer-facing staff can’t always resolve customer issues on their own. Sometimes clients make unreasonable demands; sometimes policy prohibits staff from doing what clients request; sometimes issues require urgent attention. An ‘escalation procedure’ lets staff hand over such a problem to someone who has the authority to fix it. The chain of escalation can include senior staff, management, or even the business owner. The person to whom the issue is escalated should resolve it (or escalate it to someone who can). At all times, someone must take responsibility for the customer’s issue, and inform the customer of progress if necessary. A good escalation procedure helps identify bottlenecks in customer service, but its main objectives are to fix issues quickly and to let staff get help when they need it.

Consider the staff perspective. When customers make unreasonable requests or become abusive to staff, a manager should get involved immediately. Never make your staff take abuse from customers. A pattern of forcing staff to take abuse could be used against the company (as well as individual managers) in a bullying or harassment court case.

Rigid Policies

Customers say:

They’re getting wrapped up in red tape, jumping through hoops and filling out documentation, all of which costs them undue time and effort.

The business consequences:

Bureaucracy, according to philosopher Max Weber, is “a hierarchy of authority and a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation.” A bureaucratic organisation usually has a high percentage of unhappy staff, who bounce customers around like table tennis balls. The customers get (at best) frustrated, and (more likely) outraged at the time they waste getting issues resolved. Officialism lowers overall employee morale by creating a feudal system under which staff feel powerless. Red tape frustrates customers into leaving. Proliferation multiplies staff effort and results in a far higher wage spend than is necessary. Your organisation gets a reputation for being inflexible and unresponsive.

Solutions:

Make it everyone’s job to understand the customer experience. Especially management. Understanding the customer experience is critical for those who create policies and procedures. A problem that occurs en masse is most likely due to bad communication or bad procedure, and it’s neither the fault of the employees nor the customers. Encourage staff to help identify common themes among unhappy customers.

Allow staff some flexibility. Policies should give employees enough freedom to resolve most issues efficiently.

Don’t create new policies without discarding old ones. When creating a new policy, review all related policies, and eliminate any conflicts or duplications.

Consider the customer perspective: Don’t create policies designed solely for the benefit or protection of the company. Build customer care into your policies.

False advertising

Customers say:

They think you’re unscrupulous and predatory, and that you must think they’re stupid.

The business consequences:

In retail, the most common ploy is to advertise a ‘sale’ with a hidden agenda. Maybe there are only a few sale items in stock; maybe the prices are pre-inflated to exaggerate the amount saved; maybe the customer is steered toward expensive alternatives. If the sale isn’t genuine, most customers figure it out, and they won’t trust you. You’ll get a lot of complaints and returns, both of which waste staff time, and discourages repeat business.

Another common tactic is to state or imply that the product will do far more than it actually does, or to deliberately make the product or offer hard to understand. You could find yourself in court for misleading customers — which is illegal in many countries. One customer who’s sufficiently upset can start a class action lawsuit for deceptive advertising or even fraud.

Today’s consumers avoid businesses that use unimaginative old-school tactics, where the only goal is to make the customer part with as much money as possible. They take their repeat business to a competitor who’s authentic.

Solutions:

Don’t make claims that are misleading. What some consider ‘creative advertising’ can be considered fraud when there’s a pattern of difficulties with price misunderstandings, defective product, unfulfilled rebates, coupons or gift cards with unclear restrictions, failure to deliver, or billing (such as hard-to-cancel automatic billing).

Be sure you can substantiate claims about your product’s quality, value, age, benefits, guarantee and warranty. You should be able to back up any claims with facts and documented evidence. Don’t write false customer testimonials.

Present product information in plain English. Make any qualifications abundantly clear and ensure all product information is kept up-to-date. Test the product information on a range of demographics, using subjects who don’t work in your industry. If a substantial number of test participants or customers misinterpret the offer, product, or service, correct the misunderstanding and fix your product information promptly.

Unfitness for purpose

Customers say:

Your product doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Or, it’s virtually impossible to get it working properly.

The business consequences:

Staff are overloaded with complaints from confused customers, product returns decrease revenues, or both. Customer expectations don’t align with what the product or service provides. In Australia and many other countries it’s illegal to sell products that are not fit for purpose. The business could end up with a court judgement and hefty fines.

Solutions:

Determine the cause of the confusion. Sometimes unclear or misleading advertising, faulty products, or a combination of these factors can make a perfectly good product appear unfit for purpose. If there are common themes among the complaints of confused customers, this likely points to unclear or misleading product information — so fix up your product information quick smart.

Compensate the customer in kind. If goods are faulty or services are not working as expected, make it easy to exchange or return them within a specified warranty period. If you’re not the manufacturer, ensure that you retail only for manufacturers who have acceptable return and warranty policies. For faulty services, offer service cancellation and/or fee rebates, free future services to compensate for the time period the service was not working, fast, free issue resolution or a combination of these.

Complaining customers can provide useful information. They’re telling you how to improve your business, so they don’t become ex-customers. So look after those who complain, and listen for common themes. If you communicate well with customers and within your business, you’ll be ahead of most of the competition.

Billing disputes

Customers say:

They’ve been overcharged, maybe multiple times. Their money is tied up while billing disputes take far too long to resolve.

The business consequences:

Customers range from concerned to downright angry when they’re billed more than expected, and staff are overloaded. If there’s a high volume of billing disputes, the consequences could be similar to those of false advertising or fraud, and the business could end up with a court judgement and hefty fines.

Solutions:

Just be honest about product costs. Don’t try to trick customers into spending more than they think they’re agreeing to. This means don’t hide costs in fine print, and don’t write them in legalese. If the average customer can’t understand the costs, then the business is likely to be found at fault.

Eliminate any red tape or rigid policies. All too often, faulty policies or procedures cause delays in dispute resolution. Billing disputes should have expected resolution timeframes as well as appropriate escalation procedures — as should every type of customer query.

Make sure customers understand all costs before purchase. If the product or service has ongoing costs, make the up-front and ongoing costs clear in the product information. For some services, it’s a legal requirement to document the total cost over a set service period.

Conclusion

It’s unrealistic for any business to expect zero customer complaints, but you can avoid being snowed under by the Top Nine. These solutions apply to businesses of any size, they’re not expensive, and they all involve good communication.

Complaining customers still care. They’re telling you how to improve your business, so they don’t become ex-customers. So look after those who complain, and listen for common themes. If you communicate well with customers and within your business, you’ll be ahead of most of the competition.