A Sponsored Article by Resolver Group
Optimize the customer experience by understanding and learning from customers’ complaints.
As background, there are really two moments of truth in a customer’s relationship with their company—when they purchase and when something goes wrong! It’s typically easy to get high customer scores in the purchase scenario—the customer feels pleased and confident in their purchase decision. The more difficult moment of truth, by far, is when something goes wrong, which even for the best businesses, will still happen from time to time.
So, here are 3 tips to improve that second moment of truth when something goes wrong:
1. Make it easy for the customer
to complain
This means not hiding your complaints page! We all recognize that things do go wrong, and it’s important to get feedback from your customers when they do. Doing this in the right way means that you are more likely to understand the nature of the issue and how it’s impacting your customers, giving you the maximum opportunity to put things right.
By making it easier for a customer to raise their complaint, you can dramatically increase the chances of retaining that customer. Data from Ombudsman Services’ Consumer Action Monitor study shows that, if a complaint is handled well, 75% of customers will continue to do business with the organization. If it’s handled badly, only 11% will continue to do business.
2. Treat customers as individuals
We speak to a lot of consumers to understand how they feel when making a complaint, and one thing we often hear is, “Don’t make me feel like just a number.” It might seem tempting when you get your 50th billing issue of the month to send a standard response, however, that may be the first issue that customer has ever had in 10 years.
Understanding as much about a complaint as early as possible can really help to ensure an appropriate response. This can range from triage, to ensuring that the complaint lands with an appropriately skilled CSR, to using advanced techniques to detect health and financial vulnerability from the text of the complaint.
Resolver’s intelligence services add information to individual complaints, enhancing the information available to customer service advisors. This helps these customer service representatives to provide tailored, accurate resolutions to consumer issues.
3. Learn from customers’ complaints
The old adage “prevention is better than the cure” applies to business as much as medicine! Root-cause analysis is vital to apply to complaint data—but it is often done on a manual process, which means that it doesn’t get done often, or on big data sets, as it should.
By understanding the root cause of a complaint, you can start to focus on the issues that are causing complaints for your business. Ultimately, this means an increase in customer satisfaction and less volume for your contact center to deal with.
In the diagram below, we show our data visualization tool, which uses natural language processing to chart frequency and connections to other problems. Here, in a banking example, we see that bank charges are a recurring issue and strongly linked to financial hardship and difficulty. Each of these bubbles can be drilled down on and further viewed by product or market sector or stage of the customer lifecycle to better understand the root causes.
The power of this sort of analysis is that when process improvement efforts occur, then the same analysis can be run to determine the real and quantifiable improvement as a result of the changes.