How to handle customer complaints?

Customer complaints, whether coming from profitable or unprofitable customers, is something universal to all consumer businesses, which can concern any department of a firm. The better replacement for customer complaints is customer feedback, which no sane organization can ignore, in fact all organizations depend upon it to judge their own performance and to improve, simple as truth. Handling complains can become very unprofitable, and the art of handling the complains and unprofitably that comes along it is one of the basics of marketing know-how. One of world's top marketers, John Quelch, offers some guidelines "for expediting the complaint process and keeping customers happy":

• "Understand the full context. Try to understand as much as you can about the complaint. The more information you have, the easier it is to determine the root of the dissatisfaction.
• Propose a resolution. Know what would make the situation better for your customer and propose ways you can solve the problem.
• Show respect. Complaining customers are often upset. Train employees receiving complaints to be empathetic and to reframe the harsh criticism they may receive into constructive feedback."*

From this guidelines it's clear that no matter if the customer burst with anger, the employee(r) should return the rudeness not with rudeness but with smile and respect. I have seen this many times when an angry customer or person would talk rudely to my father, and how he won their hearts, forming deep, enduring relations with them. It all happens in a spur of a moment, and those few seconds are crucial. When we keep in our sub-conscious mind that context needs to be understood at all costs, our reactions would be better, making us more and more empathetic towards our customers.

(* From Management Tip of the day, DECEMBER 2, 2009.)