Customer Complaint Management: How to Record Complaints Quickly

We live in a world where we value speed above all else. We expect two-hour delivery and two-day shipping. We can binge-watch all of the shows the second they’re released on Netflix. Social media and gaming apps give us instant gratification. The list goes on.

Suffice it to say we hate it when things are slow.

And if we’re already in a bad mood — about to record a customer complaint, say — then we really want to get it over quickly. 

That’s why it’s up to brands to handle customer complaints as fast as possible.

Benefits of Recording Customer Complaints Quickly

Consumers take speed so seriously that when they don’t experience it from brands, 77% say it lowers their quality of life. But recording customer complaints quickly isn’t just about improving your customers’ lives. It is a crucial aspect of complaint management that can significantly enhance organizational efficiency.

It simply makes good business sense. As Bill Gates wrote, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Unhappy customers can reveal all sorts of opportunities for your business.

Effective complaint management fosters lasting customer relationships and enhances brand credibility.

Thanks to negative customer reviews, you’ll discover:

• Product quality issues you can fix to boost sales and lower returns
• Delivery, shipping, or fulfillment issues that lower customer loyalty
• Call center issues, such as long wait times, you can address to improve your customer service
• New product or service offerings your customers are looking for
• Why your customers prefer a competitor’s way of doing business

The faster you gather customer feedback, the faster you can act to address it. You can resolve not just one customer’s issue but prevent it from happening to others. What started as a complaint can help streamline your operations, improve customer satisfaction, and benefit your bottom line. Effective complaint management ensures that you can resolve customer complaints efficiently and effectively.

Key Components of Faster Complaint Management

To record customer complaints faster, you need an inbound call center solution that allows you to request, store, and analyze customer feedback as part of a comprehensive complaint management process. Then, you need a plan to request that feedback immediately, and share it with your team just as immediately.

Addressing customer complaints in a timely and efficient manner is crucial for enhancing customer satisfaction and improving overall service quality. Let’s review each of these components in more detail below.

1. Use the right customer management software. 

Sure, there are helpdesk solutions and customer service chatbots you can utilize. But to really be effective, organizations need a complaint management system that connects the dots between internal and external communications. This way, you can access customer complaints in the same system your internal team uses for email and video meetings.

All-in-one software streamlines communications and boosts productivity, ensuring issues get routed to the right people and customer complaints get solved quickly. It also lets your team gather customer feedback in multiple formats, including chat, email, phone, and SMS. You want to be able to ask for feedback using whatever method your customer is comfortable giving it.

Choose a solution that offers analytics that will help you spot efficiencies for your customer service team, but it can also help you better serve individual customers.

Good analytics tools will include key details about each customer, such as their revenue, past purchases, and preferred contact methods.

Great analytics tools include all that, plus extra features like sentiment analysis.

Sentiment analysis automatically scans your customer communications for words that indicate a positive or negative experience. If something negative pops up, the account is flagged and escalated automatically — ensuring you can save customers before you hurt your company’s reputation

Did we mention that Nextiva offers all of these features? Contact one of our experts today to learn more.

2. Ask for customer feedback when it’s fresh.

The best time to ask for a positive review is when it’s freshest in the customer’s mind, aligning with their customer expectations. Customers are more likely to respond when the feedback request still feels relevant. Plus, the average human’s attention span is now shorter than a goldfish’s, at just over 8 seconds. To avoid your customer getting distracted, ask for their feedback immediately.

With Nextiva, you can send automated follow-ups after every customer service interaction. Then, the software aggregates those responses, along with their customer sentiment scores, from every interaction they’ve had with your team, including live chat, SMS, mobile, and phone interactions. No matter which agent your customer connects with next, they’ll have the information they need to respond most effectively.

3. Make it accessible.

The vast majority—76%—of consumers expect consistent interactions across departments. That’s why it’s so important to make their feedback immediately available to your team and have systems to track customer complaints.

Here’s where a UCaaS feature like Call Pop can be a call center agent’s lifesaver. Also known as call pop-ups or CTI pops, call pop lets your agents see who’s calling and their complete customer experience record before the agent picks up.

The benefits of this are clear, but call pops can go much further when paired with other CPaaS features, like Nextiva’s threaded conversations.

Threaded conversations allow everyone on your team to see a customer’s full contact history from a single screen. Save your customers the aggravation of rehashing their issue with each new agent. Instead, your agent already knows what’s bothering them and can dig right into solving it.

Not only that, but your agent will be able to see their current sentiment score and know what tone to take going into the call. Your agents can even greet them by name! All of this contributes to improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Together, call pops and threaded conversations supercharge your call center’s efficiency. With less time rehashing customer issues, your agents can take a higher volume of calls. They can also add meeting notes directly to the customer’s contact file, ensuring efficiency for the next agent who answers their call.

Faster customer service results in higher customer satisfaction

Consumer expectations for customer service are at an all-time high. Your customers expect courtesy, efficiency, and consistency — and they want it all now. To meet these expectations, it is crucial to handle customer complaints effectively.

Handling customer complaints requires a structured approach to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty.

But mistakes and miscommunications happen. When they do, the best thing you can do is record it quickly and get to work on a resolution. Managing customer complaints involves integrating AI and automation to enhance the efficiency of the feedback management process.

With Nextiva Contact Center, this is all possible. Integrated surveys deliver feedback requests immediately after a call. Threaded conversations capture a customer’s entire communications history, so every agent they chat with is on the same page. Call Pops helps your agents get started on the right foot, ensuring a well-coordinated customer service department.