What are the best practices for creating a complaint handling policy?

1 Define your objectives

Before you start writing your policy, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it. What are the main benefits of having a complaint handling policy for your business? How will it align with your vision, mission, and values? How will it support your customer service operations and standards? By defining your objectives, you will be able to craft a policy that is relevant, realistic, and measurable.

2 Identify your stakeholders

Your policy should reflect the needs and expectations of your stakeholders, both internal and external. These include your customers, employees, managers, suppliers, regulators, and any other parties that are affected by your complaint handling process. You should consult with them to understand their perspectives, preferences, and pain points. You should also communicate with them regularly to keep them informed and engaged with your policy.

4 Design your process

Your policy should clearly outline the steps and procedures for handling complaints, from receiving and recording them to investigating and resolving them, all the way to following up and closing them. Your process should be simple, streamlined, and user-friendly while ensuring compliance and quality. When considering your process, you should take into account the channels customers can use to submit complaints, the criteria for escalation of complex or serious complaints, how you will communicate with customers throughout the process, the remedies offered to address their concerns, how you will measure and evaluate the effectiveness of your complaint handling process, and how you will review and update your policy and process regularly. Additionally, you should ensure that all complaints are captured and recorded, provide customers with information at each stage of the process, offer remedies that are fair, appropriate, and effective, collect and analyze data and feedback, and incorporate lessons learned and best practices.

5 Train your staff

Your policy is only as good as the people who implement it, so you should train your staff on how to handle complaints according to your policy and process. They should be equipped with the necessary skills and tools to deal with complaints effectively and professionally. Training should cover customer service, complaint handling, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and feedback. Specifically, they need to learn how to communicate with customers in a polite and empathetic way, how to follow the steps and procedures for complaint handling, how to identify, analyze, and resolve problems, how to handle difficult customers, and how to give and receive feedback. These skills will help them manage customer emotions and expectations, apply the principles of your policy, prevent or resolve disputes and conflicts, and use feedback to improve their complaint handling performance.

6 Promote your policy

Your policy is not only a document, but also a statement of your commitment to customer service excellence. Therefore, you need to promote your policy to your customers and stakeholders, and showcase your achievements and improvements. You can do this by publishing your policy on various channels and making it visible and accessible. Invite customers and stakeholders to share their feedback and suggestions on your policy and process, and reward their participation. Additionally, highlight success stories and testimonials from satisfied customers, as well as celebrate milestones and achievements. Lastly, recognize and reward staff for their complaint handling performance and skills.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?