What are the common causes and risks of customer complaints in your business?

One thing I have found helpful as a Complaints Manager is the importance of 'under-promising, over-delivering'. It's much better to be realistic about your product or service's limitations. This way you can wow the customer when it exceeds their expectations, versus disappointing the customer when it doesn't. For example, if you say you'll respond to a query in 24 hours, but for whatever reason there is a delay, and so it takes you 2 days, the customer is likely going to be frustrated that we haven't delivered on our commitment. However, if you say you will take 3 days, and you respond in 2, they will feel you have above and beyond what was required of you. It's about setting your team up with the space and leeway to over-deliver.

Based on my experiences in Fintech recently, here goes: 1- Transaction errors due to system or technical issues. Best Practice: Quickly acknowledge errors, offer immediate resolution, and provide compensation or refunds promptly. 2- Lack of Transparency: Hidden fees, unclear terms, or misleading information. Best Practice: Provide transparent pricing structures, clearly communicate terms, and proactively educate customers on product details and updates. 3- Complex Interfaces: Confusing or unintuitive platforms leading to user errors. Best Practice: Invest in user-friendly design, conduct usability testing, and offer clear guidance through intuitive interfaces.

Poor quality of service & products, hidden charges, not committed to vision, poor after sales service, long waiting time, unresponsive agents, sloppy customer service, lack of Omni-channel support, insufficient information, content error and pricing issue are basic causes of customer complaints.

I think that there are some truths to this point, but I don't always think it comes down to staff failures. Having comprehensive complaints training is important so that customer complaints are handled confidently by staff, but when we look at the cause of the complaint it's important to move away from a culture of blame. For example, "the staff members' behaviour was perceived to be rude because they were enforcing a policy their line manager advised must at all times be enforced, this upset the customer who felt the policy didn't make sense, and the staff member wasn't listening to them?" Training & and empowering staff to provide suggestions to process or policy improvements, and moving away from a blame culture is key.

A great way to show customers you value their feedback and actively use it to improve, is to highlight on your website or social media quarterly or every six months, the key feedback themes you have received and the actions you took as a company to resolve them. This shows your customers that you do actually value their feedback, and it allows your customers to feel reassured that if they buy your product or use your service and it goes wrong, you are a company that actively works to put it right. This helps to increase confidence in your company.