Have you ever tried to make a customer complaint? At present time complaints happen every day. When a customer complaints, it is usually for a good reason or genuine concern but it’s not necessary that all the complaints are genuine. Customers usually make a complaint when their purchase decision (product or service) didn’t meet their expectation.

We must take care of the customer by listening to the complaint and resolving it, to ensure a happy customer. Very few unhappy customers are there who bring complaints to your attention. It is important to understand that we recognize complaints as opportunities in order to do necessary changes in our current product/service which will lead to understand more accurate pictures of market and consumers buying behaviour.

Here I am explaining few key pointers and the ways how to handle customer complaints in professional and smooth manners:

Stay Cool: When a customer comes to you with a complaint, always keep in mind that complaint is not personal. Whatever the concern is it always related to the brand. As a front end staff your first responsibility is to understand their concern, be calm and never react at the first phase.

Listen Carefully: Let the customers speak first. Do not interrupt. Understand their concern carefully and revert with phrases such as, “I see”, “Apologize for any negative experience”, “Tell me more” about your concern etc. Things that you need to take care is “customer must be entre in calm phase of mind before s/he can hear your solution or anything else that matter the most”.

Acknowledge and Address the concern: Let the customers know that you are hearing their concern and addressing the problem. As in this phase it is much important to make customer feel more important than anything else. It doesn’t matter either the issue is small or big, it must be acknowledge and address professionally.

Offer Solution and Do follow-ups: After addressing the problems, next step is to provide the appropriate solution to customers. Offer them what you can do with in your boundaries. If something is there which is not in your hands escalate the same to your immediate boss at the same time to resolve the issue on priority. Still if you think, it’s not possible to resolve the concern at same time interval, request to customer and take their permission for some time in order to provide the appropriate solution as per the situation.

After solution of the concern, do follow-ups with customer regarding their satisfaction level.

It is much important to know because in this way customer given you a one more chance to create a signature shopping experience that they can share with their friends. When you resolve customer complaints successfully, you will better understand their needs, retain them as loyal customers, and enhance your business.