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Ways to Avoid (and Manage) Customer Complaints

You’ve been searching online for your company, and you have decided to check to see how the perception of your business is faring with clients. To your shock and horror, you discover online that your company actually has numerous complaints and bad reviews. In fact, they might be outweighing the good! No wonder your sales have been so low lately because, unfortunately, customers do check out reviews online before they ever even think about committing to a purchase.

The good news though is that most of these complaints and issues are easily avoidable. Moreover, if you avoid them, you can get far better reviews and opinions from customers. You’ll ensure that sales don’t slip because of issues with customers who do not appreciate your product or service. So, what issues cause customers to turn away from your business and how can you avoid them?

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They Do Not Reply or Communicate With Me

You see this on Amazon quite a lot. This may be because they chose not to as it is any company’s prerogative whether or not to reply to customer complaints. It may also be probably because they simply do not have the support to handle customer complaints. Both are rather bad news, and the simple fact is if you cannot handle customer complaints, you need to hire someone who can. There are outsourcing companies that can be used specifically for this purpose. Talk to them, communicate with them and make sure they understand that you are listening. Or rather someone is. That will change the impression of your business drastically for your customers ensuring that they feel as though your company is paying attention to their needs.

In fact, you might want to set about replying to some of your negative customer reactions. Talk to them and engage, making sure that you let them know you understand their point of view. Additionally, send a note to let them know how they can contact you if they wish and leave details that they can use to do this. Not all customers will reply, but that doesn’t matter. The important thing is that you’re showing your customers that you do care and that they can trust your company.

angry-website

I Can’t Believe Their App And Website Crashed…AGAIN

Are you having a technical issue with your website or perhaps your app? If that’s the case, then you need to make sure that you correct this issue immediately. Remember any problem with tech like this will cause you to lose potential sales. Imagine how many sales you might lose if your app is down for just five minutes or even a full hour! To prevent this from happening, you invest in website testing. Learn more by researching web and app testing online to make sure that your tech and software is operating effectively and to guarantee that you don’t miss any sales due to downtime.

Of course, that’s not the only issue that you need to watch out for with your computer systems. Your server and overall IT security could be compromised, along with your company and your customers’ vital information. You can probably imagine how or why this could be an issue for a business owner and indeed customers. With an IT support team, if an issue like this occurs, the problem will be fixed rapidly and things will get back on track in your business.

Oh, Dear, The Packaging Is Awful

You’re probably going to be buying and investing in packaging from an outsourcing company, and that’s understandable. An outsourcing company will allow you to keep the costs of your business low. However, you still have to make sure that things are kept to a high-quality level. For instance, you might want to consider investing in biodegradable packaging. These days, it’s not uncommon for customers to be eager to buy from a business that is eco-friendly. It is also worth pointing out that many of your competitors might have already jumped on this idea. For instance, Amazon already makes sure that all their packaging is biodegradable. You might say, wait a minute, I don’t compete with Amazon? Oh yes, you do. Every e-commerce seller and most other companies compete with Amazon or a similar big supplier.

The trick to great packaging is it needs to be both cheap and secure. With the right supplier, this is something that you can guarantee.

Staff Were Rude

You do have to watch out for this issue because it suggests that your hiring process is a bit problematic. Essentially, you need to do what you can to get the best team of working for your business. Anything less than this will result in customers leaving your business and going to your competition. This is why you should keep track of the staff and make sure that they are providing the ultimate level of service to your clients. One of the ways that you can do this is by regularly testing your staff and the level of service that they are providing.

If you are using outsourcing, you’ll want to keep track of customer service operators. When you call customer service numbers yourself, you might notice that many ask customers to provide feedback at the end of the call. This provides key information about whether the business is providing a sufficient quality of service that makes customers want to continue buying. Even ten questions at the end of a phone call can tell you whether you should continue to use the same staff in your business.

As you can see then, you can encounter a number of issues that customers can have with your company. Nevertheless, we think you will agree that most are easy to manage. Therefore, there is no need to let these complaints drag your company down. Fix the problem, tackle it head on, and get your company back on track on the market.