What Causes Customer Complaints

Have you ever had a grievance as a customer? How did this feel? And, if you complained, how did the customer service representative respond to you and what was the outcome of your complaint?

omplaints from customers may arise for many reasons. Things go wrong, from late deliveries to billing errors, to product defects. All these problems can inconvenience and frustrate customers.

Have you ever had a grievance as a customer? How did this feel? And, if you complained, how did the customer service representative respond to you and what was the outcome of your complaint?

When things go wrong you're likely to feel frustrated. You might also be one of those people who delays making a complaint until your frustration has intensified into a feeling of anger. This is common. And it means many customers are already distressed and angry before they make contact with a customer service representative.

To avoid adding to customers' feelings of frustration, it's important that when you handle complaints from customers, you avoid certain common mistakes.

REFLECT

Based on your experience, can you think of some of the types of responses from service representatives that are likely to add to customers' frustration?

COMMON MISTAKES

Customers often get more distressed when they feel that employees are trying to avoid responsibility for problems or denying that problems exist at all. Nobody likes to be contradicted or told to calm down, so customers generally don't respond well to this.

Another common erroneous response is to criticize your colleagues, your company, or your products or services to a customer.

You may make promises you can't keep in an attempt to placate a customer. When you do this, you set unrealistic expectations you can't fulfill.

Finally, some service representatives assume their customers are acting in bad faith. Being doubted in this way is upsetting for anyone.

So when you deal with dissatisfied customers, you need to avoid a number of common mistakes. These range from avoiding your responsibilities to assuming your customers are acting in bad faith.

I have been teaching and training agents, team leaders, supervisors, managers and admins of call centers and other businesses in BPO related fields. This series, comes as a result of that experience. I have more than 4,000 modules that I plan on sharing here. This is # 002-02

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