95% of your unhappy customers will never complain. They feel that complaining isn’t worth their effort, or they don’t know how, or to whom to complain.
Listen to Your Unsatisfied Customers Carefully
It’s essential to listen to customers who complain. Listening closely lets you fix any underlying problems with your business process, so that other customers don’t run into the same issues. Additionally, if the problem is resolved, your customers won’t badmouth your company to others.
Develop a System to Resolve Complaints Promptly
Customers whose complaints are satisfactorily resolved often become even more company-loyal than customers who were never unhappy.
What you can do:
- Encourage your customers to complain!
- Develop a systematic approach for addressing service failures
- Train employees to properly handle complaints and provide customers with compensation for failures
- Remove barriers that make it difficult for customers to complain. Examples include providing phone numbers and links to contact forms on your website
- Keep customer and product databases so that you can analyze the types and sources of complaints so that you can continuously adjust your policies
Make Sure Your Employees are Happy
Employee relations will affect customer relations. It’s harder to get disgruntled employees to go the extra mile for your customers. Conduct regular audits on employee job satisfaction, listen to their complaints and encourage two-way communication.