It’s a company’s worst nightmare: a client or customer calls, unhappy with the product or service they have received. An unhappy customer should always be taken seriously. Research has suggested that unhappy customers are very likely to pass on their happiness to their friends and family. In fact, a disgruntled customer can quickly tell many other people about the bad service or product they have received from your business. This is a negative marketing message, counteracting all the positive promotion you have been trying to drum up for your company.
Dealing with disgruntled customers
If you have a customer who is unhappy, the most important thing to do is not to panic and not ignore the situation. Many businesses either sweep aside any critiques of their business, or displace the blame onto an employee, making that employee feel terrible. Neither is the correct approach. It is important to approach the situation calmly and to keep communication with the unhappy customer open. Ideally, it is important that you take for responsibility for the problem — even if you think the customer or client was partly at fault. Next, you must sincerely apologize for the problem directly to the customer in a personalized way. Then, you must try to make amends so the customer remains satisfied. Making amends can be as simple as asking the customer or client “what can we do to make this right?” and following through on the action the customer has recommended. Of course, some customers will make unreasonable demands, or demands the company cannot meet. However, by continuing to communicate and by continually expressing a desire to correct the situation, you can often come up with some sort of compromise that will leave the customer satisfied as to the level of service they’re getting.
Relenta CRM and disgruntled customers
Relenta CRM can help your company deal with unsatisfied customers. Many customers initially make their complaints or concerns known via e-mail. If this is the case, your Relenta CRM system allows you to quickly access to the customer’s complaint in the correct department. This allows someone from the right department to quickly deal with the problem. At the same time, since Relenta CRM does not hide individual e-mails within individual e-mail inboxes, it is far less likely that customer complaints can be lost and ignored. Administrators and other members of the team can see that a customer has written in with a complaint, and this can help ensure that several team members are aware of the problem and are prepared to act on the problem. Relenta CRM also allows your company to keep a history of e-mails for each contact. This allows you to see exactly how a complaint has been handled, how often a particular customer has made complaints in the past, and what a customer’s order history is with the company. This allows the company to quickly pinpoint potentially problematic clients and customers, and allows team members to quickly gather information about a specific order or request, in order to pinpoint what went wrong. Relenta CRM can even allow your team to prepare canned emails that can be personalized. This allows your team to respond to customer complaints automatically.
