How to Respond to a Customer Complaint? [Best Practices With Example]

Customer complaints are part of the business. No matter if you deliver top-notch services and high-quality products, customers will complain.

Everyone likes being praised, but customer complaints are also a valuable source of learning. You get to know where your product/service is lagging and how to optimize it.

So, once you have mastered how to respond to a customer complaint, your business can turn that negative response into a fruitful outcome and also increase customer satisfaction.

That's exactly what we will talk about today in our guide. Here, you will get to learn the best practices and examples to tackle common customer complaints. So, let's get started!

1. Why do Customers Complain?
2. How to Respond to Customer Complaints Effectively?
3. Best Practices to Tackle Customer Complaints
4. Conclusion

Why do Customers Complain?

There are two main reasons that can make your customers complain or leave negative feedback:

1. They faced disappointment with the product/service.
2. They were expecting more from your brand.

However, do you know that 91% of customers just leave the brand without complaining if they have trouble with it? It means that many times, you don't even know the reason why customers are leaving your brand.

Therefore, if you get a customer complaint, don't think of it as an individual matter. Instead, it represents the common issue that many customers face but don't complain about and leave silently.

How to Respond to Customer Complaints Effectively?

The first thing you should remember is that you and the customer are both on the same team. The customer is like your review inspector who tests your product/service and urges you to fix the shortcomings.

Best Practices to Tackle Customer Complaints

When you receive a customer complaint, below are the few best practices you should follow to turn the negativity into positivity:

1. Stay Calm: Negative feedback or criticism is not what you may have expected, so it may frustrate you. You may not agree with what the customer has said in the review. But it's the moment where you should stay calm. When you are calm, you will be in a better position to tackle the situation effectively.
2. Listen: A disappointed customer may be harsh on their words, but you must show them you are listening. You can calm them down and use words like “I understand”, “Tell me more”, etc.
3. Ask More Questions: Once the customer has conveyed their disappointment, you should ask more questions. This will make the customer feel valued and also let you learn more about the issue.
4. Provide an Action Plan: Once the complaint is clear, provide the customer with a clear action plan on how you will tackle the situation and resolve it.

In short, customer complaints need your patience, attention, and commitment to tackle the situation effectively and extract valuable outcomes from it.

Let's now talk about a few common customer complaints as an example and learn how to respond to a customer complaint:

1. Long Waiting for the Reply

Customers today need an abrupt response to their queries. They don't like to hold long on phones or wait hours for your replies. In fact, 75% of online customers intend to get help in 5 minutes after making online contact.

How to respond to a customer complaint about a long wait?

A long waiting time often happens when the support team is busy dealing with other customers or your support process lacks automation.

Therefore, a few of the recommended solutions to tackle this are as follows:

1. Hire more customer support representatives.
2. Automate customer support with chatbots. For instance, VOC AI Chatbot allows you to create your AI-powered bot that can resolve 80% of support queries autonomously.

- End -