Handling Customer Complaints and Managing Service Recovery

Customer complaints and service recovery are the most important things for a business, they both have potential to affect customers level of satisfaction. They also provide a chance for the customer to offer their different opinion, thereby improving the business service. As shown in Figure 12.1, when there is service failure customers elicit different responses. Due to this variation of behaviour; the business would never know what the customer is thinking without understanding customer complaint behaviours. Moreover, once the business knows what makes a customer unhappy, they need to quickly respond to the customer.

One in four customers has a problem with products purchased. If the item purchased is relatively low in price, only one in five will register a complaint (Eccles & Durand 1998). Most of the customers will not complain even though they have a problem with the product. For example, when people buy flowers from Canary Jane’s Flowers, once they get home and find the flowers are not fresh, they probably won’t go back to the shop and complain because the cost of time complaining does not seem worth it.Instead they may decide not come to the shop again. Therefore, Canary Jane’s Flowers needs to make a different plan for customers, making a complaint strategy to maximise customer satisfaction, such as recording the customer mobile phone number and make a call to them after the customer purchase. The business should always be proactive to gather information from the customer (Blazevic & Lievens 2007).

Once the business receives the complaint from customer, there are many steps to recover services. The most effective way is returning the money to the customer if there is a big problem with the product, or apologise to the customer and attempt to find out why they’re dissatisfied, thereby the business can provide adequate explanation to persuade the customer to come back again. In addition, the business should build blueprints to help the manager to go through every fail point of the service, and avoid it happening again, this is another method of service recovery.

References:

Eccles, G & Durand, P 1998, 'Complaining customers, service recovery and continuous improvement',Managing Service Quality, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 68-71.

Blazevic, V & Lievens, A 2007, 'Managing innovation through customer coproduced knowledge in electronic services: An exploratory study', Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 138-151.