COMPLAINT RESPONSE LETTERS
COMPLAINT RESPONSE LETTERS
The four recommended Best Practices of responding to complaints are these:
Timeliness
Open-endedness
Warmth
Personal Ownership
Timeliness
Not only is this required by law, it is definitely required by courtesy. Most companies have their processes in line with the law. The three notes to consider for improvement if your company has not attained them are (1) to apply the same time standards to customer complaints as is applicable for Department complaints; (2) to apply the shortest time standard among states to your customer responses; and (3) if a complaint will not be responded to quickly, for instance, within three days, send a notification of receipt.
This notification can be as curt as a generic postcard letting the customer know the correspondence or complaint has been received and that it will be a few days before there are results. Even on a postcard, a blank can be filled in as to how many days it might be (10 or 14 might seem reasonable). If a form letter is used, a sentence can be inserted as to the steps that need to be taken, like “We are reviewing your complaint, and will need to get input from the producer before we make a determination.”
Some response, sooner than later, will extend the customer’s patience to postpone them contacting the Department.
Open-endedness
A wise business gambit is “the customer is always right.” Considering complaint responses, the customer will want the company to have listened and that there is some nod to “being right.” Phrases such as “While we understand your position” or “We appreciate your question” or “We apologize for any misunderstanding” may be appropriate ‘feel-good’ language to use. There are those who will say that if your letters sound open-ended, the customer will keep coming back again and again with the same complaint.
For most companies, however, there is a balance to be struck. The firm’s decision is generally final, barring some additional and unforeseen information coming from the customer. That unexpected information is the very reason to keep the response letter open-ended. The last paragraph can read, “If you have additional information the company should consider regarding this incident, please provide that to us.”
Warmth
The theme of professionalism tempered with friendliness can be applied to any customer contact, including responses to complaints. This applies to Customer Service Representatives’ telephone service as well as correspondence. Again, strike a balance somewhere between too friendly and too cold, and your customers will appreciate the response more.
Reviewing your historical complaint files, with letters of response, you may find a range of tones all the way from the “this is the company’s decision and it’s final” to “I wish I could help you, but they made this decision and it’s out of my hands, sorry.”
This is, again, a place that template paragraphs can be very useful to those who handle complaints, to find just the right note (see February 2005 CLEARView for more on template language). The customer can feel that the company has listened to them, and that the company made the decision based on facts, not just arbitrarily.
Personal Ownership
If your complaint handlers do not identify themselves by name in their response letters, that may have been a company decision made to protect the employees. However, there are other ways to protect their identity while still being customer-friendly.
Signature. The person’s name should appear at the end of the correspondence. If the company chooses not to do this, false last names can be assigned – all the complaint handlers can even be Smith or Jones, if you choose. Give an identity to the customer so the same complaint handler can be responsive to additional correspondence from that customer.
Contact Information. In addition to the industry standard of including a toll-free number in any customer contact, the complaint handler should include an extension or a direct line (even if not toll-free). The customer should feel that this individual cares about his or her problem.
Email Address. This is a rare, but excellent, practice. At least one company has the standard of including the email address of the complaint handler in response letters so that if customers prefer, they can email their individual-who-cares and even attach documents. The email address should be to the individual, but doesn’t have to include their full name (unless the address is assigned the Jones or Smith generic last name by I.T.), if the company wishes to protect the employee that way.
If your company already uses some or all of these Practices, hopefully, someone still monitors outgoing complaint responses. One or two people, either high-up over the Complaint Department or Customer Service Department, or even in Compliance, should be reviewing correspondence. This can be done with every piece or with a random, meaningful sample, partly depending on how many complaints are received and partly on how experienced the complaint-handlers are. Whatever the numbers that are reviewed, the assessment can help the company achieve “one voice” in the complaint responses, a voice that can help retain customers and build loyalty.
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