Avoid Disputes, Not Complaints Best Practice Customer Complaint Handling Stuart Ayres, Scheme Manager Derek Pullen, Scheme Adjudicator

The best want customers to complain Make it easy for your customers to complain, and your customers will make it easy for you to improve

Key lessons  Dissatisfied customers tell twice as many people compared to those who are happy  Respond to complaints quickly and courteously with common sense to improve loyalty  Resolve complaints on first contact reduces cost by 50%  IT utilisation critical  Recruit and hire the best

Best Practice - Toyota Doing the job right the first time Effective complaint management Maximum customer satisfaction and loyalty +

Why tackle customer complaints?  Critical to reputation and bottom lines - satisfied complainants are more likely to purchase again  Satisfied complainants tell friends and neighbours and are not easily won over by competition  Increased customer and employee satisfaction  Opportunity to correct service delivery  Promotes trust and public confidence

Leadership Strategies  Satisfying customers is a top priority  Customer concerns and complaints are viewed as opportunities for improvement, not problems  Make it easy for customers to complain, and just as easy for employees to solve problems  Use customer feedback for planning and communication with employees  Recognise that a well-managed customer recovery improves the bottom line

Information and Analysis  Observe trends. Track whether volume of complaints is increasing or decreasing  Use technology. Capture and analyse root-cause data  Bring in technology to support change; don’t change to support technology  Data must be translated into information and presented to everyone in useable forma  Align services and products to meet customer expectations

Planning  Information generated from complaints should drive business decisions and strategic planning  Integrate the information and use it to serve customers  Use customer feedback for decisions about how resources are used  Communicate the strategic plan throughout organisation  Have dynamic planning processes that use customer information to develop future scenarios and business

HR Development and Management  Use complaint analysis and trends to identify HR priorities  Make customer complaints handling position part of your organisation’s career path  Invest in training to develop technical and people skills of front line staff  Give employees authority and responsibility to resolve complaints  Recognise and reward success  Create a performance culture where complaints are an opportunity to improve rather than an indictment of performance

Managing Customer Expectations to Improve Satisfaction  Customer education key to managing customer expectations  Know how to say no;  Draw limits, but ensure customers feel heard and treated fairly  Give an explanation, be open, honest, professional, and considerate  Understand what customers want  Maintain one-on-one relationship with customers  It is not always possible to satisfy customers – but having procedures and trained staff is part of an effective Internal Complaints Process

Complaint Process Management  Customers and employees have input to the design, and understand the complaint process;  Process map  One-stop resolution and transparent  IT based and 0800  If response time goals are too stringent, the quality of the resolutions will be negatively affected  Continuous improvement is the key to beating competition – refine, redesign and improve processes while putting customer first

Business Results Success =  Long-term profitability generated by maximising customer satisfaction and loyalty  Hearing the voice of the customer and the employee  Effective business measurement tools  Customers with minor problems that are promptly and effectively handled that are more loyal than customers that don’t have problem!

Business Results Measures often used:  Key performance indicators  Timeliness and efficiency  Customer satisfaction  Call centre measures  Correspondence measures  Workload measure  Employee satisfaction

Avoid Disputes, Not Complaints “Customers can not only talk back, they can look into the very workings of your business and decide if you conduct yourself in a way they approve of. In this world, your reputation will be the sum total of all your conduct and interactions, which will now be so much more measurable by outsiders” Tom Friedman, “The World is Flat”