How to stop hating customer complaints: Step 3: Forewarned is forearmed. Turn past experiences into useful Props to support your team's autonomy

Hey there,

The process we went though last time is good enough to get you going.

It will be even better if you arm everyone who has to run it with all the information they need to handle it well - without having to consult you at all.

So in this newsletter were going to look at how to:

• Create Per-Product Complaint Scenarios
• Make it easy to pull together a Customer Lifetime History for every customer
• Use these alongside the Net Profit Margins Calculators you’ve already produced to give your team the information they need to use their own judgement wisely.

Start by choosing one Product or Service. You could choose by net-profit margin, frequency of sale, frequency of complaints. It doesn’t matter how you choose, but choose one. Once you’ve gone through this process for a single product or service, you can a) use it immediately to restore Customer Faith for that product or service, and b) you’ll know how to do it again with everything else you sell.

Create Per-Product Complaint Scenarios

Thinking about the product or service you’ve selected:

Review any complaints you’ve already received about this product or service:

• What was the complaint?
• Why did this happen?
• Was it something specific to the product or service?
• Was it something more general about the way we do things?
• What collateral damage occurred?
  • What did that cost the client?
• What additional inconvenience was incurred?
  • What did that cost the client?

Of course, you may not have had a complaint about this product or service. That doesn’t necessarily mean nothing has ever gone wrong. It could simply mean that nobody told you about it.

Or it could mean that the product or service is new.

Either way, you can still ask useful questions:

• What might go wrong?
• What could be misused?
• What could be misunderstood?
• What could be forgotten?
• What could easily fail?
• What collateral damage could occur as a result?
  • What would that cost the client?
• What inconvenience could arise as a result?
  • What would that cost the client?

Here’s a template for logging what you find: Per Product Complaint Scenarios ​

Make it easy to pull together a Customer Lifetime History for every customer

You should already have general figures for Customer Lifetime Net Profit, worked out in a previous newsletter and stored in your Net Profit Margins Calculator.

What can make dealing with a complaint even more comfortable for both parties, is having a 'Customer Lifetime History' for the specific individual that happens to be in front of you at the time. Or at least being able to easily pull up that information.

So how could you do that?

If you take payments online or electronically this is easy. You already have a record of purchases from which you can select the customer’s name, purchase date and value. You'll also have a record of returns, reviews and other information they may have volunteered about the experience.

If people pay cash, then you have to trust in the knowledge of your team.

This might feel risky, but actually it’s not. I buy my fruit from a stall in our local high street. Sometimes I pay by card, but most often I pay cash. The people working on the stall know me by sight, and often chat while we’re doing business.

Recently I found I didn’t have quite enough cash to pay for what I wanted. They were perfectly happy to let me take the goods and pay next time.

It works because they know me. If I want to cheat, I have to make my mind up never to shop there again.

Or wait until a complete newbie is running the stand alone. For most people it’s not worth the effort or the inconvenience. Plus they might spread the word of my untrustworthiness to nearby businesses.

You can supplement this with information from your Complaint Log. This will give you an idea of whether a customer makes a habit of complaining.

This might all feel a bit creepy.

What about privacy?

Well, if you deal online or electronically, you are allowed to hold information pertaining to doing business with the customer. The key is to store it securely, and only let anyone have access to it when they actually need it - for the purpose of doing business.

You can use this kind of information alongside the Net Profit Margins Calculators you’ve already produced to give your team the data tehy need to use their own judgement wisely when following the universal process.

Let’s take a positive example from my personal experience. A few weeks ago, someone tried to use my credit card details fraudulently, so I had to replace the card.

While I was waiting for it to arrive, an online order I’d placed with Waitrose & Partners fell due. Payment failed of course. I called them to let them know what had happened and cancel the order.

After a brief check,the person on the other end of the line said “I can see you’re a regular customer of ours, so we are happy to let you have the order now, and pay for it when your new card details arrive.” I was pleasantly gobsmacked. And delighted.

Of course, this was actually an easy offer to make, given the right information.

Of course they know the net profit margins on the products I buy. They know that I buy regularly, every fortnight or so and have done for years. My Customer Lifetime Net Profit is high. They also know that until now, my credit card payment goes through without a hitch, and I’ve never complained.

If I’d taken the offer up and then defaulted, I would forfeit my shopping and probably get banned as an online customer. But the person I dealt with could feel confident making that offer. And the effect on me was to make me feel even better about my relationship with Waitrose & Partners.

Now take a negative example. Say a customer complains loudly and angrily about something they say they’ve bought from you. But when you look them up, what they bought isn’t what they are trying to replace.

Or perhaps they turn out to be a serial complainer. Not because you keep getting things wrong, but because they use complaining as a way to get discounts after purchase.

Once again, given the right information, whoever is dealing with the complaint can feel confident about refusing a replacement or a refund. Not just because of the facts, but also because the customer has shown themselves to be the kind of customer your business can actually do without.

That doesn’t mean they can’t offer any kind of compensation, just that the limits of what’s possible for them to explore with the customer are different.

It’s even possible that the customer still leaves with a good impression of your business - firm but fair, and not a soft touch.

A final twist

Of course, while you’re creating your Per-Product Complaint Scenarios, thinking about what has gone wrong, or what might go wrong, it makes absolute sense to also ask the followup questions:

What could we do to stop it happening (again)?

What are the possible unintended consequences?

Then do the work of preventing them.

What changes should be made?

Who will make the changes?

When will the changes happen?

And of course log all that in your Complaint Log and Follow-up Checklist.

What this means is that the Restore Customer Faith Process looks different:

Instead of this:

A process where mistakes happen and are then dealt with and corrected.

You have this:

A process where potential mistakes are addressed before they happen, while unforseen mistakes are still dealt with as they happen.

The point of all this (and all the work I do with clients) is not to impose rigid rules for handling complaints on your team.

It’s to empower them to use their own judgement wisely, whatever the situation in front of them.

Having a straightforward process to follow plus easy access to supporting information is the best way to give them and you the confidence do that for real.

Especially if you train them in how to use it first: A simple Framework you can use to teach people a new process.

That’s it for this newsletter.

Here’s what I hope you learned today:

• Forewarned is forearmed. Giving your team as much information as you can about likely causes for complaint, net profit figures and customer lifetime history gives them confidence to deal firmly but fairly with every complaint. And the confidence to tailor solutions to suit the actual person in front of them.
• If you don’t already keep track of customer lifetime histories, now is a good time to start. You can do this without infringing their privacy, by storing information securely, and restricting its use to specific cases like this.
• If you can pre-empt likely mistakes before they happen, you can proactively reduce any losses of faith in your business. If there's anything better than having an effectve and human process for making unhappy customers happy again. It’s doing the best you can to prevent any unhappiness in the first place.

So, time to take action.

Pick a Product or Service.

Put together it’s Per Product Complaint Scenarios.

Start pre-empting complaints before they even happen.The process we went though last time is good enough to get you going.

As always, get in touch if you'd like to bounce any ideas around, ask questions, or even complain!

Cheers,

Thanks for reading!

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