Whether you run an online business or a local business, how you respond to complaints from customers is extremely important. Once in a while, you might receive a complaint about your products or services. It is always a good idea to respond to the complaint in the shortest time possible. But, finding a complaint online, especially if you are running a local business is never a good feeling. This is how you practice handling bad reviews about your business. To handle this, an effective annual review has to be conducted.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
Another important thing that you should do to deliver amazing customer support, is using goal-setting softwares like OKRs. OKRs helps you to track and manage the performance of teams and departments of your organization. Maintaining a standard customer support team can be crucial, and OKRs help to perform measurable results that qualifies the objective and the right key results at the targeted time. OKRs also help to close tickets within a specific period of time. Closing tickets early will reduce the number of bad reviews and will give a positive impression to your customers. You can calculate the average time taken to reply per ticket, to analyze how to improve your customer experience.
Familiarize yourself with online tools
Knowing how to utilize online tools– for example Google alerts, social media tools and platforms, Yelp, and other online tools at your disposal– will enable you to monitor comments and complaints as well as bad reviews about your business. Make it a habit to regularly go through all the social media platforms that your business has a presence in and find out what people are saying about your business.
Avoid getting defensive
If there is anything you should avoid at all costs it is getting defensive. Online users tend to comment on anything and everything that interests them. And, when you get defensive, you will give them something to comment and continue complaining about. You are a business person, and what should matter above anything else is serving customers and turning a profit. Therefore, do not worry so much about what they are saying online. All you have to do is focus on improving your services and customer service. So the best way to deal with complaints is to always be positive and neutralize such incidents.
Always take responsibility online
Refuting the complaint is the last thing you should do. If the issue is completely false it is advisable to contact the site administrators and have the complaint removed. Otherwise denying that it ever happened will raise unnecessary heat and debate.
Make your response prominent and public
When responding to the complaint ensure that you respond positively and let the complainant know that you want to make things right. Avoid being the last person to comment or respond to such a complaint. Ensure that each and every one sees your positive and professional response.
Always keep everything positive
In order for you to manage and deal with an online complaint or bad reviews without causing unnecessary debates or worse, a viral story,, you need to treat each and every positively. In cases where a customer persists with negativity it is advisable to encourage them to call you so you can make things right.
Train your employees
As a way to prevent future complaints and bad reviews, it is important to train your staff on how to handle complaints as they happen. They should learn to be friendly, welcoming, professional, and above all, responsive at all times.
Customers tend to remember times when they were treated well. It may be a small problem or a big problem but how you manage that problem is what matters. Always endeavor to make things right for your business and customers.