Recently getclosure’s Patrick Deale presented to the Credit Providers Association on the topic of Best Practice for Complaints Management. I thought that Patrick’s presentation was superb and that our blog readers would find comments on it useful.

Working from a UK Financial Services Board review, Patrick summarised best practices for complaints handling as follows:
• Create a culture that does not view complaints negatively
• Make it easy for customers to complain
• Respond promptly and appropriately
• Communicate with clients more clearly
• Use the feedback & information to guide decisions
• Identify & rectify the root causes of complaints.

This might all sound simple and reasonable; however, the getclosure! ratings reveal implementation can be challenging. Whilst some suppliers, like African Bank, consistently outperform their industry ratings with getclosure!, others struggle to do so.

Often the reasons for failure are simple. For example, in his presentation Patrick quoted from a Harris Interactive Survey finding the most common consumer frustrations were:
• 44% not able to understand a customer service agent
• 45% being put on hold listening to bad music or repetitive messages
• 39% spending long periods of time on a web-site or an automated phone system searching for important information and not finding it.

Unfortunately, no matter how good your complaints handling system or how clear your communication with customers, mistakes will happen and a proportion of customers will be dissatisfied.

One simple way of improving on your customer retention is to identify and make use of the range of external complaints channels available to your customers to engage with them when they complain outside of (or indeed about) your complaints resolution systems. A range of statutory and private channels exist. In brief overview: available statutory channels include Ombudsmen, Consumer Councils & Tribunals, Industry and Trade Bodies; and there are a range of independent channels ranging from social networking sites like Facebook, to blogs and whinge sites through to private and discrete online service providers like getclosure! The getclosure! team can help you identify the range of channels, and which channels are most likely to be accessed by your customers.

For more information on any of the topics in this article, please contact either Patrick or Richard.

Quentin is also one of the team who dreamed up getclosure! With a background in law, arbitration and business, he has gained extensive experience in technology transfer and IP exploitation and now serves as an advisor to leading hi-tech corporations in several countries. Click here to read more about Quentin.