Adaptive Marketing LLC® Offers Tips on Addressing Customer Complaints and Concerns

A business without customers is like a tour bus without passengers, destined to wander the streets until it runs out of fuel or breaks down. Adaptive Marketing LLC®, an industry leader in membership and loyalty programs, knows that keeping customers happy is just as important as delivering valuable products. And one critical factor in ensuring customers satisfaction is to provide them with excellent service at all contact points.

As anyone who’s worked in the retail business can attest, the first rule of customer service is that the customer is always right. The second rule says that, even when the customer is wrong, refer to the first rule. Adaptive Marketing notes that, while these two rules still apply, businesses would do well to remember a few other tips that can help steer them and their customers into contented, long-term relationships:

-- Tell the truth. If it worked for the father of our country (and it did), it can work for businesses, too. Don’t play consumers for fools. Most people can tell the difference between an honest answer and a run-around, and the folks who can’t probably aren’t reliable long-term customers anyway.

-- Don’t turn your call center into a pinball game. Most customer complaints fall into three general categories — common, personal and unusual — and most of those fall into the common category. Make sure your customer service reps can quickly and ably address common complaints on their own rather than bouncing calls from supervisor to manager to on-hold limbo.

-- Train for success. The often-overlooked word in the phrase “customer service representative” is “representative”; customer service reps are the symbolic face or voice of a company to its customers. As such, they should be trained in all facets of the company’s business. While they don’t need to know proprietary business information, they certainly should be able to explain, fully and easily, the company’s products, services, guarantees, warranties and any other information that customers have a right to know.

-- Love may fail, but courtesy will prevail. Not every customer contact point is a happy one; in fact, unhappy customers tend to speak up a lot more than happy ones do. When a customer turns up the heat and the volume, the best thing a customer service rep can do is to maintain a civil tone and try to address the customer’s complaint rather than his or her conduct. In this age of electronic bulletin boards, simple courtesy can help keep a small dispute from blowing up into a large altercation or, even worse, a slow-news-day media fest.

Customers are the fuel that keeps businesses running. Treat yours like a valued commodity, and your company should stand the test of time, reports Adaptive Marketing.