How Can I Improve The Complaints Handling Process For My Business?

The results from the UK Customer Satisfaction Index (January 2023) illustrated that complaints handling has a large impact on overall customer satisfaction. The UKCSI report provides a multitude of recommendations to help businesses increase their customer satisfaction. As a provider of complaint management software, we’re focusing on recommendations to improve the complaints-handling process.

So how can you improve your complaint handling process?

Firstly, it is important to view your customer experience as an asset and a source of value, rather than just as a cost centre. Before you read on, take a look at our first blog in the UKCSI series to learn how complaints handling affects customer satisfaction.

Here are some of our key tips for improving your complaints management process:

• Consider a frontline triage process - assigning degrees of urgency to different complaints.
  • This empowers your frontline staff to take action quickly on complaints they can deal with, with a fast escalation process for those they can’t.
• Invest in technology that allows room for the human.
  • Implementing a complaints management system removes the admin burden from your customer service staff so they can do what they are good at – taking care of your people.
  • Person-focused technology is something which is incredibly important to us at Workpro. You can read more about what we have termed considerate automation in this blog.
• Utilise your complaints data to inform your strategy.
  • Recording every complaint, no matter how small, ensures you have all the data you need to improve your service – read on to find out why this is such an important step.

Complaints data provides insights which can inform strategy

One of the key recommendations to come out of the UKCSI report was to use customer insight to inform strategy development. It also suggests that identifying root causes of repeat problems and developing plans to address them will have a large benefit.

Customer complaints provide a rich source of data which can be analysed in-depth. The data extracted can focus on trend analysis showing metrics like how many complaints are being received or how long it is taking to resolve complaints. Even more interestingly data can be analysed to find the most common causes of complaints. Finding the root cause of customer complaints allows you to put the correct measures in place to reduce total complaints and increase customer satisfaction.

So how do you get that data? Investing in complaints management software is an obvious answer (and what you would expect us to say!) but it’s not the full story. Workpro Complaints Management Software offers positive and relatively quick action an organisation can take to improve customer satisfaction…and it costs much less than you might expect, especially compared to the productivity hit you could be experiencing.

If implementing complaints-handling software seems like the right solution for you then why not check out our third blog in the UKCSI series which dissects some key considerations when implementing new technology in your complaints-handling process.