Complaints Management
Handling complaints thoroughly and quickly Effectively dealing with complaints from customers is an opportunity for you to reduce customer churn and improve business processes.
Sigma Connected has extensive complaint management expertise
Customer complaints are, unfortunately, something that every business faces from time to time.
But complaints don’t have to be seen as a huge negative – if you have the right process in place for complaints management, it can be a fantastic opportunity to refine your product or service, improve your customers’ experience, and grow as a business.
Of course, this all hangs on the effectiveness of your customer complaint management protocols and the size of your team, as this will dictate your capacity for handling complaints.
And sadly, some businesses don’t have the time or resources to be able to develop a complaint management system that handles complaints in the most effective manner, leading to unresolved issues, unhappy customers, and low customer retention.
That’s where our team here at Sigma Connected becomes a vital part of your customer contact and complaints process.
We’ll be able to assist or even completely manage your complaints, leaning on our wealth of expertise in the field to achieve high levels of resolution and maintain healthy relationships with new or existing customers.
If you’re looking to learn more about how our team can help your business to manage complaints professionally, be sure to get in touch with us today!
Complaints management:
Why it’s important to your business
The importance of effective complaint procedures can’t be overstated.
In many cases, it can be the difference between a lost customer and a salvaged relationship, which in turn means that your complaints management can directly impact your opportunity for repeat business in the future.
It’s something that needs to be made a priority for your business.
If managed properly, you can reduce customer churn and improve your processes off the back of the feedback that you receive from your customers, but first, you need to implement a process that enables those customers to voice their concerns openly.
When you partner with Sigma Connected, we’ll look to review your complaints management process and implement improvements to these protocols where needed, or simply just add additional capacity – our solutions are flexible and designed to give you what you need when you need it.
In addition to this, we’ll also continue to utilize real-time data to identify any key stages where customer churn can be reduced, enabling us to feed into your operations and improve your workflows holistically.
Every great business cares about what its customers think, but before you can start to consider what they’re saying, you need to give them the platform to be able to voice their feedback and complaints in the right way.
For most businesses, this will mean creating a dedicated line of communication specifically for customer complaints.
By having a specific channel for this type of content, you can ensure that valuable customers are directed to the correct representative for their concerns – this streamlines communications and ensures that complaints are handled efficiently.
Here at Sigma Connected, our complaints management team is well-prepared to deal with complaints and similar feedback. We’ve trained our teams in best practices for handling difficult situations productively and constructively, helping to protect your brand whilst resolving issues and improving customer satisfaction.
Once we’ve received feedback from your customers, we’ll begin to analyze the complaint and ensure it’s tracked in the right way – this way we can monitor future complaints to identify trends and patterns that can serve as action points to change a product or service in line with what customers are looking for.
All aspects of customer service are designed to create the best experience possible for every customer that interacts with your business.
Happy customers repay your business with brand loyalty and word-of-mouth endorsements, which can serve as invaluable marketing tools when growing your business or testing new products with your target market.
For us, a key component of our work is to ensure that you’re able to turn your customers’ comments into actionable points – this is where our data collection becomes your biggest asset.
We’ll be able to provide you with quantifiable data that highlights issues in the customer journey, giving clear insights that you can put into practice by altering your process and giving your customers the changes that they want to see.
From here, you’ll find it much easier to review whether your alterations have been effective by considering the number of complaints received relating to the issue that you have addressed. If you see a big reduction or a complete elimination of complaints on that issue, you can mark that as a problem solved!
At Sigma Connected, we try to settle debts sooner with our pre-delinquency and early arrears collections.
Complaints can come and go in waves, especially at times when large changes are happening at your business such as new product launches, price alterations, stock issues, or other problems that may impact a customer’s experience with your business.
When you’re hit with this influx of complaints, it’s natural for you to feel worried about finding the right way to handle them.
Whether it’s a lack of resources stopping you from addressing each customer directly or an absence of situational awareness that’s hindering your ability to diffuse issues and reach resolutions, there are lots of reasons that your complaints management may not be working as it should.
Of course, you don’t want to increase resources by hiring more customer service team members to handle complaints for an issue that’s expected to pass once the necessary alterations have been made.
Increasing complaint handling capacity via recruiting has two major drawbacks:
- An increased risk of redundancies if there is a change in demand
- Additional resources are required for recruitment and training
So, how do you increase your capacity for handling complaints without encountering these drawbacks?
The answer is simple: outsourced complaints management solutions.
By outsourcing your complaints management to the Sigma Connected team, you’ll be able to scale your resources to meet the demand you’re seeing at the present moment in time.
This will mean you’re able to maintain the highest level of customer support despite the rising number of complaints being handled, resulting in a higher level of customer satisfaction across the board and an improved customer experience.
We’ll help you to reduce customer frustrations
Poor customer service and complaints management can leave your customers feeling incredibly frustrated and the longer that they’re feeling this way, the more chance there is of that customer churning, meaning a customer is lost.
Once lost, that customer becomes much harder to bring back on side, so we’ll look to prevent customer churn by addressing issues in the customer service and complaints management process – if a customer is unhappy with a product or service, the relationship can still be retained through effective customer relationship management techniques.
Here are some of the common customer frustrations that we’ll help you to tackle:
Longer than average wait times
One of the key metrics that we’ll be looking to help you improve is your average hold time.
The average hold time is the amount of time that a customer is on the line before they’re able to talk to an advisor and the longer this time is, the more likely the customer is to hang up the phone and find advice elsewhere.
Research has found that customers are most likely to end their call at around the 2-minute mark and once they reach this point, only 70% of customers will try to make a second contact attempt.
To us, this says that there’s one chance to help that customer, so you need to make it count.
Minimizing call transferring
Once a customer is through to an advisor, they want to find their resolution as quickly as possible, so you must be ensuring that customers are handed to the right department as often as possible.
By hitting the right destination in the first instance, the customer will reduce the amount of information they need to repeat as well as the overall fatigue of the call, creating a more pleasant experience holistically.
By ensuring you have effective call filtering and automation in place during the initial stages of the call, you can ensure that a high percentage of customers calling your support lines are directed to the person that they need to reach, rather than being sent on a wild goose chase to find the information that they’re seeking.
Improving omnichannel presence
In the digital age, customers have their preferences when it comes to communication channels and can be left frustrated when they aren’t able to use their first-choice method to contact customer service or make a complaint.
But with communications coming from all directions on a range of different platforms, it’s easy for the customer’s experience to feel disjointed and repetitive.
We’ll look to minimize these frustrations by reducing barriers and issues caused by a lack of integration, ensuring that your customers are able to receive the support they need on any platform without having to repeat themselves.
With the Sigma Connected team, you’ll find it easier than ever to maintain a high-touch omnichannel presence – we’ll monitor social media channels, email complaints, phone calls, and website chats to ensure that we’re giving your customers ample opportunity to get in touch in a way that suits them.
How we’ll handle customer complaints
Listen and learn
Customers like to feel valued by the businesses that they invest their time and money into, but too often they feel as though they’re just another number.
Our team of customer service experts will ensure that your customers are given the attention they need to feel valued and heard during the complaints process.
Identify the complaint type
Each complaint is unique, but being able to differentiate complaints into different categories allows us to ensure that we’re able to spot patterns quickly and make changes as soon as we possibly can to reduce repeat instances of the same issue.
Timely responses
Nobody likes to be left in the dark, so we’ll look to give your customers the support they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
We’ll reduce the amount of time spent on hold and deal with questions, queries, and complaints quickly and effectively to keep customers happy and reduce wasted time.
Verify resolved complaints
Perhaps the most important step of the complaints process is verification once the issue is resolved.
Once a complaint has been raised and addressed, we’ll ensure that all resolved cases are verified and documented safely and securely.
This will help us to keep a track of success rates, whilst also giving us more data to review – there could even be improvements to be made to the process that we’re implementing on the back of the feedback that we receive from your customers!
Get in touch with our team today
Outsourced complaints management can make a huge difference to your customer service experience, giving customers dedicated lines of communication that make filing complaints and receiving a response easier than ever before.
If you’d like to chat to our team about the options available to your business, you can fill out our handy contact form here on our website – we’ll just need some basic information to get the ball rolling and from there, we can start to formulate a bespoke action plan that works for your business!