Handling Customer Complaints

Even the best business will receive an occasional customer complaint. Knowing how to resolve these complaints will help you gain loyal customers who will then refer others to your business. Here are some important tips.

1. Listen carefully to the customer and gather as much information as possible.

2. Restate the complaint as you understand it. This ensures that you completely understand what the situation is.

3. Resolve the problem as quickly as possible. Tell the person you are sorry this happened and ask what you can to do to make this right. Do not argue with the customer, even though you are right and do not become defensive.

3. After correcting the problem, tell the customer thank you for bringing it to your attention and that you appreciate their business.

4. Develop a written policy for your staff to follow and reward them when they do a good job.

Remember! The customer may not always be right, but an unhappy customer treated right may well be one of your most loyal customers.

About The Author

Luana Emmons is a restauant owner and owner of allfoodbusiness.com (http://www.allfoodbusiness.com). See this and other articles on her website; allfoodbusiness@allfoodbusiness.com

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Customer Service Information:

Related Articles

What Every Manager Should Know About How to Win the Loyalty of Customers
Dr. Michael LeBoeuf, in his cassette album entitled, Win Customers and Keep Them for Life presents twelve principles that will transform the workplace into a customer-driven, highly motivational team.
Responding to Complaints
It's possible that in the course of your business dealings, you may (just may) have to deal with a complaint from a customer or client ..
Communicating Value
Abstract: People buy for their reasons, not yours. This article covers the key elements that prospects want to hear you talk about.
Clients - What They Want from You
A growing number of individuals are finding themselves called to help others and go on to fulfil this call by training to become a practitioner in one of the healing arts.The range of conventional, traditional, holistic, complementary and alternative therapies is extensive with new thoughts on old themes being introduced almost daily.
Making The Most Of Newsletters
Newsletters can be wonderful tools for communicating with your customers or prospects. Because of their format, they're often infused with more credibility than traditional brochures.
Whats The Customer Service Buzz About Your Business?
If you're a regular reader of my column you know that my number one pet peeve is bad customer service. Nothing chaps my backside more than paying hard-earned money for a product or service only to have the provider of said product or service become apathetic, obnoxious or just downright rude after the transactional smoke has cleared.
Over Delivering Provides Big Results
Over promising is a problem only when you under deliver. There are a number of ways that you can overdeliver to your customers or prospects, and as a result create a win-win situation for you both.
Outsourcing: The Unspoken Costs
Outsourcing seems to be the new-new thing and approximately 50% of our major corporations are doing it. What are the costs? The benefits? And what skills need to be managed in order to make it work optimally?Let's get a clear understanding of what we mean by outsourcing: it's the shifting of easily codified jobs - such as help desk support, call centers, system maintenance, and programming jobs - to countries that can manage them more cheaply.
A White Paper: Profiting with Kindness
In 2002, there wasn't much interest for Kindness in business, and some business people would question, "What does kindness have to do with business, anyway?" Is this a for real question or just to prove a point? Or perhaps they couldn't figure out what being kind really had to do with business. Or perhaps the word was a jargon word, an unfamiliar language.
Handling Angry Clients
What do you do when your client gets mad at you? How do you handle this? An angry client can be one of the biggest time and energy drains on a sales person. What you should specifically do will obviously depend on what the client is angry about.
Call Center Software - Your Tool of Choice in Customer Relations
The call center represents your first line of communication with customers and potential customers. Whether you choose to outsource this service or to establish an in-company call center, this is one area in which quality is paramount and cannot be compromised.
It's Customer Service Stupid: Delivering Customer Service Training That Sticks
"Society is always taken by surprise at any new example of common sense."This Ralph Waldo Emerson quote opens one of the most impressive works on customer service: Michael LeBoeuf's book How To Win Customers and Keep Them For Life.
The Death of the Loyal Customer
One of my classes in management focused on the repeat customer. The course stressed the importance of the repeat customer to the financial welfare of the business.
First Contact: The Source of Customer Loyalty
With customers being smarter, more cost conscious, more product knowledgeable and more demanding, improving customer service has become a major focus within many businesses. In Customer Satisfaction is Worthless; Customer Loyalty is Priceless, author Jeffrey Gitomer contends the real solution is shifting the paradigm away from customer service to customer loyalty.
Retail Store U-Scan Machines: Self-Serve or Voluntary Part Time Job?
Do many of us realize that we are working an unpaid part time job for the grocery stores and some home appliance stores? We are ringing up our own goods, are not getting any price discount for doing so and are saving these retailers money.Each self-serve lane contains two to three self-serve scanners.
Are You Putting Technology Before Your Customers?
Which is more important the technology or the customer?The one thing about the online world you can be sure of is change.It seems like every day there is a new technology being addedwhich will make the internet more accessible.
Empowering Customer Service Vital
It never fails to amaze me how many companies have employees who are empowered to offer former customers wonderful incentives to lure them back, yet their customer service representatives have the ability to offer virtually nothing to convince an unhappy customer to stay.Powerless, these CSRs often actually ignore customers' requests and declarations of their intent to leave, even encouraging them to seek out another company!They often repeat the few phrases they're allowed to say over and over again, further infuriating the customers.
What Every Employee Should Know About How to Win the Loyalty of Customers
Dr. Michael LeBoeuf, in his cassette album entitled, Win Customers and Keep Them for Life presents twelve principles that will transform the workplace into a customer-driven, highly motivational team.
Handling Customer Complaints
Even the best business will receive an occasional customer complaint. Knowing how to resolve these complaints will help you gain loyal customers who will then refer others to your business.
Customer Service: Why Bears Make Bad Customers
Every business owner should have a picture of his or her ideal customer. When I picture my ideal customer, I see a business owner struggling to find time for all that needs to be done, someone passionate about what they do, someone striving to find answers to make their business run better.