With the review megaphones, it has never been more important to handle dissatisfied customers. Here are some tips to handling these customers.
The first thing to remember with customer disputes is that this is a business issue. The customer has enough emotion for both of you. Lose yours. Take an analytic view of the situation, consider the possible outcomes, and seek the solution with the best return/least cost to the business. Forget right and wrong. Forget fair and unfair. Focus on the bottom line. Giving money back to someone who doesn’t deserve it may be the least expensive outcome of a customer dispute.
In the past, if you felt a customer was unreasonable, you could ignore her. She might file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau that few people would know about and that you could dispute if you were a member. She might tell a few friends and neighbors. Any impact from that one customer was unlikely to be noticed.
Today, she can get on Angie’s List, Yelp, Google Reviews or one of the other sites and spray vitriol all over your reputation and there’s not much you can do about it other than encourage positive reviews from other customers. You cannot ignore unreasonable customers. You must deal with them.
Empower the front line
Whoever first deals with an upset customer should be empowered to resolve the situation. Customer problems are distractions. Resolving issues fast gets them off the table.
In addition customers are more likely to be satisfied with the outcome if the solution comes quickly and more likely to accept less. Think about your own experience.
Unfortunately, front line personnel do not always act as you would like. In fact, they are usually tougher than you would be. If you want them to handle the situation the way you would, give them a process to follow.
A simple process shared by a contractor on the Service Roundtable is the last method:
·Listen to the customer.
·Apologize for the situation or how the customer feels without admitting fault.
·Solve the problem by asking the customer what she wants, up to a certain amount without checking with you.
·Thank the customer for her patience and patronage.
Always ask customers what they want before making offers. Usually, people want less than you are prepared to give. If so, give them what they want and a little bit more.
Sometimes nothing will satisfy a customer. For example, the customer calls with a problem that you cannot find when you return. The problem may even morph into unrelated problems in the house because the customer confuses coincidence with cause and effect. Even a full refund will not satisfy this customer.
Ask the customer if you can send a third party to look the situation over. Pay another company to come out and see if they can find the problem.
Overcome bad reviews
When a customer submits a bad review and you resolve the problem, ask her to remove it or update it. If she refuses, write a careful response that factually states what happened after the customer complained. Keep emotion out of it. Do not make accusations. State that you were alarmed to read the review, contacted the customer, and performed the following steps.
If a customer is disingenuous, write a response with the utmost care. The customer will automatically have more credibility than you. Sometimes the best way to handle these is to suggest that the customer must have confused you with a different company because you did none of those things. You did these different things.
Any documentation that supports your position can also be deployed. A contractor on the Service Roundtable records all calls and was able to produce the recording of a customer screaming profanities at the call taker, which destroyed the complainer’s credibility.
If you suspect a competitor wrote a bad review, search for other reviews under the same reviewer’s handle. More than likely, a competitor will slam several plumbing companies. Point this out to the review site. It’s in the site’s interest to remove phony reviews. If the review site will not remove the reviews, carefully respond and note that this reviewer rated a number of plumbing companies poorly at the same time, suggesting that this is a competitor.
Ultimately, the best way to overcome bad reviews is to surround them with good reviews. Encourage your customers to review your company after every call. E-mail the customer links to review sites to make it easy.
We have always had a few dissatisfied customers, but we have never had dissatisfied customers with the megaphones that the review sites give. This change makes it incumbent on you to resolve problems fast in a manner customers consider fair.
Matt Michel is CEO of the Service Roundtable, contracting’s largest business alliance. For a free copy of the Service Roundtable’s process on “How to Handle Customer Complaints,” call 877.262.3341 ask for a Success Consultant. Visit www.ServiceRoundtable.com and click on the “Free Stuff” tab for other useful tools and information.