What is the most effective way to use your CRM system for customer complaints?

In today's data-driven world, possessing accurate and valuable complaint records is an essential resource for identifying substantial improvements. Furthermore, the ability to expand and organize these complaint records serves as a vital tool for recognizing trends and understanding that various types of errors, when well-organized, may all originate from the same underlying issue. Based on my experience, when data is well-structured and accuracy is upheld, it becomes easier to extract valuable insights from the information. This is especially crucial when using a CRM system to manage customer complaints.

Using your CRM to manage customer complaints should go beyond passively receiving complaints. A great CRM will have tools for collecting surveys and for creating tickets built in or integrated. Customers should be asked to complete surveys at different points throughout their lifecycle with you. The results of these surveys should drive automations, such as creation and assignment of a ticket to your team if you get negative feedback. Talking to this customer will likely provide important insight. Similarly, they should also have a lead score that remains active beyond purchasing in order to measure if customers are continuing to engage with your emails, social media posts, etc. If a lead score is low, then engage that customer.

A smart CRM will leverage automation to make it easy for you to track complains efficiently. When you get negative feedback or a customer is disengaged, a ticket should be created automatically along with tasks for your team to complete in order to follow up on negative feedback. Ticket pipelines should have SLAs and automations to ensure that all tickets are addressed in a timely manner. If your negative feedback is coming in via surveys or forms, use drop-down, radio select, or checkbox fields to collect consistent data that you can measure. For even more efficient complaint tracking, integrate an AI tool that will allow you to analyze for the sentiment of your complaints, making it easier to track what issues are arising.

While technology will allow you to collect and track feedback with automation, your team still needs to take time to ensure that they understand your customer's issues and resolve them fully. Training your team to respond in complete and empathetic ways will build trust with your customers. Here are some important steps to take in order to respond to complaints effectively: 1.) Acknowledge and validate the complaint. This does not mean you have to agree, but you do need to treat your customers like the feelings behind their complaints are valid, no matter what 2.) Provide a solution in a clear format - use bullet points, screenshots, or screen recordings 3.) Think 2-3 questions ahead - what follow-up questions may be asked?

CRMs that have automation features built-in provide you with opportunities to be proactive about your follow-up to customer complaints. Here is an example: My company runs regular NPS surveys via HubSpot's Service Hub. When a client submits a detractor score (0-6), a workflow is triggered that sends a Slack notification to the internal client channel and forwards the feedback to our VP of services. This automatic escalation ensures that proper followup is completed in a timely fashion.

This can be done in a number of ways, which is why I recommended using repeatable answers via static options in your surveys and playbooks. The more you can standardize your options, the easier it will be to report on your feedback and understand patterns that exist in the negative feedback that you receive. If you want to go a step further, you can use automations and integrations to analyze the sentiment of a single conversation or a group of conversations. By leveraging static fields, automation, and AI, you can easily stay on top of your customer's feedback and address issues that consistently come up.