Questions
- Has the number of frustrated, angry, or unhappy customers calling into your business increased?
- Have your CSAT scores decreased?
- Are your team’s customer-facing people getting more frustrated than a few years ago?
- Do you blame this growing frustration on COVID-19, supply-chain issues, or the exit of your most experienced employees?
Unfortunately, the problem is not caused by any one of these situations. The blame partially lies with all of them, but it also lies with your company and how it communicates or doesn’t communicate with your customers.
The Causes of Customer Anger
Like all of us, customers generally worry about the future for themselves, their families, and their co-workers. They are concerned about climate change and election security. They worry about Russia’s attack on Ukraine and China’s aggressive military buildup. What your customers want most is the peace of mind that comes from things working the way we expect them to: no surprises, disappointments, or hassles.
What to Do When an Unhappy Customer Calls You
When people make an effort to call or email you with an actual or perceived problem, they are more than just a little upset. They are probably running on a short fuse and getting ready to explode. Your first reactions should be to:
- Get the facts.
- Demonstrate empathy.
- Either know or promise to learn what happened from the involved person.
- If you need time to determine the next step, promise to get back to the complainer.
- Reach out to them on or before the agreed time and share what you have learned.
- If your company was at fault, explain what happened and what you are doing to prevent the same situation from occurring again. Then, offer some appropriate compensation. It does not have to be expensive; even a donation in their name to a favorite charity shows how seriously you took their complaint.
- If the company was not at fault, explain why you believe you are correct, then make the same offer as the previous point as compensation for their frustration.
- Implement corrective action, regardless of the cause of the complaint. The best thing you can do is prevent the same issue from occurring again.
Why Was That Unhappy Customer’s Call or Email a Gift?
Before your customer detected their first issue with your company, product, or service, they were confident that you would handle any case professionally and to their satisfaction. After all, things had been going well, and they were getting the benefits the salesperson had promised. Then something happened, and they started to worry about how you would handle it. At this point, there are two possible outcomes:
- If your actions disappoint them, they may re-evaluate your competitors when they make their next purchasing or renewal decision.
- If your actions impress them, they will probably become more loyal to your company and strongly oppose any suggestions about evaluating your competition when their next purchasing opportunity occurs.
You want the second outcome.
How to Prepare Your Team to Respond to Potentially Unhappy Customers
The only way to ensure you impress your customers is to train all your employees to behave when the company makes a mistake. This is not a one-time effort but an ongoing series of talks, classes, and discussions, with the desired outcome being a change in the company’s culture.
When a company reaches a maturity level where it does not oversell products and services but instead delivers slightly more than it promised, and when it finally makes a mistake, it recovers quickly and professionally. Hassle-free, customers do not have any reason to worry about the future. This is the definition of trust. Your company is no longer viewed as a vendor but as a partner! You can also take this relationship to the bank.
Without positive and negative customer feedback, you cannot generate and reinforce this trust. That is why every complaint is a gift to be cherished.
Here is an oldie but a goodie related to this article.
About Middlesex Consulting
At Middlesex Consulting, we partner with the field service teams of B2B capital equipment companies challenged to grow their top and bottom lines. We use value creation, service marketing, and customer experience techniques to identify and create service offers that achieve customers’ desired business outcomes. To discuss how we can grow your business, write to Sam here.