Poor complaints handling adds cost to your business. How much exactly? It turns out quite a lot; one survey found that poor customer service costs UK businesses around £37 billion every year.
Obviously, all complaints handling (good or bad) incurs cost. You can however take steps to reduce these costs.
In assessing your own complaints handling, weigh up the following cost pillars:
A complaint can cost anything from say £5, if closed at the front line in a single phone call, to thousands of pounds if it requires in depth investigation. One key to reducing costs is closing more cases at the frontline:
One Workpro customer reduced costs by 37%
Another customer uses an online 'triage' form to quickly capture complaints
Of course, the customer's time is also important.
Time to handle complaints is a key determinant of your customer satisfaction levels:
It costs at least five times as much to gain a new customer as to keep an existing one, so keeping an unhappy customer is a top priority for all businesses. Investing in a responsive complaints-handling system can help you build loyalty and to mitigate against the well-known iceberg effect.
Organisations use a wide variety of systems and tools to record complaints, from spreadsheets to dedicated complaints management systems. Technology which helps you manage (not just record complaints) will improve the consistency and quality of your response. Our whitepaper covers this in more depth.
The iceberg effect: Unvoiced complaints and negative word of mouth
Unless their story is about how well you put things right!
Make it as easy as possible for people to complain, and to learn from those complaints to improve your customer experience:
You can monitor outcomes and analyse complaints data for trends and root causes – giving you invaluable insight to improve your products and services.
Alerts and reminders prompt users at relevant stages of the complaints handling process to ensure all complainants receive the same professional service.
If you operate in a regulated environment, regulators can impose hefty fines for poor complaint handling. Litigation costs can also arise – from a class action for example. The best way to mitigate against these costs is to have a fair and transparent complaints process.
Redress costs include compensation and re-performing the service for the customer. A good complaints handling system also helps you keep track of and report on these.
Maintain an audit of what action you took, when
Use workflow targets and rules to ensure compliance
Customers who are well treated by the complaints handling process are less likely to churn than customers who have never complained!
Customer complaints are valuable. With Workpro, your team will not simply administer complaints. You will track performance, learn from feedback and refine processes.
Ready to try it? Book a free online demo today.