Receiving customer complaints is inevitable for any organization.
Especially ones that are scaling.
And, while you can’t always stop a complaint from coming in, there are things you can do to ensure they’re dealt with and resolved to deter future incidents.
Ticketing, for example, is a great way to manage and resolve complaints to improve satisfaction and reduce churn. Let’s explore.
Why Ticketing Is Effective For Complaint Handling
When you think of complaint handling what comes to mind? Usually, it’s the traditional process of having a physical complaint box on-site or using a generic “info@” email address.
While this may have proved useful in earlier years, as businesses continue to evolve, these methods become less effective. Traditional processes in general are hard to keep up with. There is no database of responses so you can’t collect useful insight and having one channel to collect feedback doesn’t exactly entice customers. Traditional complaint handling also lacks real-time capabilities. While you can receive a message from a customer immediately after they email it, if you’re using a generic email inbox, odds are you’ll have hundreds of other emails to sift through.
Tickets, in contrast, are a great way to stay on top of complaints and ensure you’re consistently enhancing the experience. Ticketing solutions, like the Loop Experience Platform, enable you to see the status of resolution so you’re never left guessing what’s been handled. Further, ticketing solutions allow teams to see the time submitted and sentiment, so they can act fast and prioritize resolutions accordingly.
Finally ticketing solutions house all complaints in a single location. Whether Facebook Messenger, Email, WhatsApp or Text Message, everything is siloed so you aren’t jumping from one channel to the next. Having multiple channels also encourages greater feedback – leaving less room for negative sentiment online.
6 Effective Ways to Use Tickets for Complaint Handling
In relation to complaint handling, ticketing clearly comes with its set of benefits. Let’s learn how you can maximize it.
Set Automatic Ticket Workflows
One of the biggest downfalls of traditional complaint handling is key individuals not seeing the complaint or not being involved in the resolution. This takes up time for both the customer waiting for a response and employees coordinating action.
Workflows are an essential part of the ticketing process, that ensures the right people see the right message. Using workflows, each survey project can be set up with its own unique criteria. Use specific tags and sentiments to trigger different departments and seniority levels.
As an example, in a cafe, if a customer writes in to complain about receiving cold food, the kitchen and the customer service department can be notified in real-time. The kitchen can modify preparation techniques and customer service can connect with the customer.
If you’re curious about how this works, click here to get an overview of how ticket workflows function within the Loop Experience Platform.
Take Action Immediately
The sooner you take action on a ticket the greater chance you have of recovering the experience. A rule of thumb is acknowledging the complaint within the first 10 minutes of receiving it. If you find yourself held back tending to or resolving the issue, it’s vital that you communicate consistently to the customer so they’re not left wondering what’s taking so long.
Reduce or Eliminate Escalations
Management teams are generally understaffed and overworked, therefore it’s important to empower your team to manage the experience on their own. Escalations should always be reserved for time-sensitive complaints or as a last-ditch effort to recover the experience.
For employees on the floor, have a process in place to de-escalate issues. The goal is to avoid passing them on as a default and rather hear the customer out and make changes. Further, make sure to set reasonable tags associated with escalations to managers, so they aren’t bombarded with every message that comes in.
Prioritize Tickets
Receiving an influx of tickets and responding to all of them in real-time might not be realistic for your business. This is especially true during peak hours or moments when your team is understaffed.
In these situations, it’s important to prioritize tickets based on urgency and sentiment and take action as soon as possible.
If you’re unsure what to prioritize, here are a few questions to consider:
- How long ago did they write in?
- What is the customer’s sentiment?
- Is the request time sensitive? Does this need to be resolved right this minute?
- Have they written in before? How was the resolution?
Considering these questions you can get a better idea of what tickets need your immediate attention.
With that in mind, always be wary of time to fulfill. You want to avoid employees resolving tickets simply out of preference and rather in order of the queue. If employees get in the habit of choosing what’s easiest for them, it could lead to a collection of tickets with long wait times.
Look at the Data
Knowing how a problem is resolved and reporting back on those actions is key to understanding the overall customer experience. It’s important to know how an issue came about, how it was resolved, the final sentiment of the customer and how you can avoid the same complaint in the future.
Whether that be in the form of improving cleanliness, offering better service or holding more products in line with preferences, data can help you shape your experience for happier customers and optimized spend.
Root Cause Analysis
For complaints, understanding the root cause is critical. A great feature to utilize within the Loop Experience Platform is Root Cause Analysis. This feature enables you to do this across multiple locations. From a resolved ticket, your team can add what the theme of the issue was whether cleanliness, service, etc. so you can review trends over time. It helps provide a synopsis of common complaints and can help your team focus their efforts to deter that specific issue from happening again.
Read more on how to set up Ticket Root Causes in our Help Center
Hold Regular Departmental Meetings
If you’re a business that has frontline staff directly connecting with customers, then it’s vital that the data you gathered is shared on a regular cadence. Whether that be weekly, monthly or quarterly meetings, sharing insight can ensure everyone is aligned and consistently improving the experience.
To avoid long drawn-out meetings, we suggest splitting them up by departments. Focus on the goals set out and hold teams accountable for their responsibilities. Celebrating outstanding departments and employees can add a fun competitive element.
