Uplifting Blog

The Value of Customer Complaints: Ten Reasons Why Complaints are a Good Thing (Part One)

Learning the value of customer complaints is an important step in taking your company to the next level.

It’s a fact.

When things go wrong, customers will complain.

But if you know how to handle them, complaints can be turned into constructive opportunities for your team and your company to grow.

The value of customer complaints are tenfold.

Read on to discover ten ways that customer complaints can be turned on their head to be a benefit to you and your company! (Part two to follow.)

1. Identify vital areas for service improvement.
  • Customer complaints highlight key areas where your product needs work, your systems need updating or your service is flagging.
  • They can also point to staff members who need extra training, a refresher course, or closer supervision. You are only as strong as your weakest member!
  • Consistency can be monitored through customer complaints. By observing where complaints are being focused, service levels across shifts, departments, locations and teams can be clearly seen and addressed.
2. Identify needed improvement in policies and procedures.
  • The value of customer complaints becomes very clear when you start seeing areas that need improvement in your procedures. Your company might be operating with policies and procedures that are inconvenient for your team or your customers. Or they may be unclear or simply unnecessary. Customer complaints can point to these cases.

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3. Improve customer communication.
  • Simply, customer complaints open opportunities for you and your team to have frank discussions with your customers. These conversations can help customers feel like the vital components to your success that they are.
  • Also, complaints from customers can point out information that is lacking, erroneous or out of date.
4. Keep senior management informed.
  • Often, customer complaints can shoot straight to the top, depending on how much of the company is affected. In this way, leaders and senior management can quickly learn about service issues that are important to your customers and also your team.
  • While it’s not ideal for senior management to be involved in customer complaints, it never hurts to have them occasionally involved in the day-to-day workings of the company. This allows a glimpse at what’s happening “on the ground”, and also grants them the opportunity to communicate with team members they might not normally have access to.
5. Improve your service education.
  • Customer complaints can give you valuable insight into your service education programs and how to improve them.
  • Complaints can be used as training models and content to educate your future team members. They provide rich information to publish for your staff members to read—with your replies, improvements and recovery action steps.

I hope this article has helped you to see the value of customer complaints! Keep an eye on this blog to catch part two of this list.

This article was originally published in June 2017 and has been updated.

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Ron Kaufman

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