complaintsrgreat

We are experiencing a rapid increase in the availability of technology-driven products that facilitate a platform that we will interact with on a daily basis. The suppliers of these products are also providing us with an expanding array of channels to provide feedback and give our opinions of the quality of the solution and the experience.

Earlier this year, I attended a talk by Richard Sedley of Foviance on social media and customer service. Richard gave a very engaging presentation and reminded me of the importance of story telling in engaging with an audience.

Richard outlined the key components for a good story. They are:

Complaint management requires your organisation to focus on internal and external communications - your customers give comments on services and products using a variety of channels and your organisation conducts a variety of internal communicates to produce a satisfactory response that can be given to the customer. All of this produces data about customer interactions that you can measure and analyse - and utilise to drive improvements based on what customers are telling you about your products and services.

I want to share with you a personal complaint handling hell. I've had my fair share of negative service experiences - and some positive ones - but I'm usually quite capable of getting the issue resolved without needing to find alternative solutions. However, I have recently experienced the worst example. Interestingly, it is the worst example because I had expected much better from the company. I've had very poor complaint responses from a variety of companies but didn't expect much more from those companies (thanks to their reputations).

Social media has given business a new channel to evaluate and assess the strategies that will actually be required to deliver effective customer service - even if that assessment decides that the strategy should be simply to not make customer service available on that channel. Traditionally, companies have designed and implemented formal and official processes for capturing and managing customer complaints and feedback.