Effective service recovery - Using customer feedback as a strategic tool

Most people focus on winning new customers
Growth potential and greater market share basically mean achieving new customers. This is a permanent item on the agenda at practically all meetings in the sales and advertising departments of most organisations. Sales people are encouraged to find new customers. Marketing is aimed at potential customers. Winning new customers is the way towards growth.

Only rarely do organisations concern themselves with the customers they have lost. As long as the number of lost customers does not exceed the number of new customers, they are happy. This is strange, because the ability to make existing customers happy and to keep them is closely connected with the ability to attract new customers. Vast resources were invested in winning those customers who were later lost, resulting in an investment loss. This ought to be enough to do something about the problem. Do you happen to know how many customers your organisation is losing every year? And perhaps even more importantly: Do you know why?

Your new customers are often your competitors' unhappy customers
It is no secret that many new customers are somebody else's former customers. In other words, customers can be “moved”. But happy customers are almost impossible to move. For this reason it is your competitor's unhappy customers who can be moved to your organisation. They have had a negative experience and expect something better. These customers are aware of the attitude towards criticism and complaints. This is one more reason to take an interest in this programme, so that your front-line staff can learn to give the competitor's unhappy customers a positive experience in order to turn them into regular customers.

You will be grateful for a complaint
Some organisations count the number of complaints and expect this to represent the total number of unhappy customers. Surveys show that this number is to be multiplied by 27. This is because many customers do not bother to complain. They don't think it will make any difference. They are used to an impassive and suspicious attitude. It is easier just to change their supplier. However, customers don't keep their dissatisfaction to themselves. Typically, people talk very little about positive experiences, whilst negative experiences travel alarmingly far.

With a bad reputation, it is both difficult and expensive to win new customers. Therefore, there is good reason to be pleased when a customer complains, because it gives you an opportunity to turn a negative experience into a positive one - and to keep the customer.

You will learn positive complaint handling and have a better relationship with your customers
On the programme we present methods that can turn a negative customer situation into a positive one. You will learn how to introduce an effective complaint culture and how to make this penetrate the entire organisation from managers to front-line staff. The seminar looks into the organisation's complaints processing system and policy, uncovers obstacles in the service system and defines standards for the organisation's complaints policy. New guidelines are set up for processing complaints, both oral and written. The seminar provides ideas and inspiration along with concrete suggestions for formulating an effective complaints policy as part of a customer service policy or an overall quality policy. And we give you ideas for developing your personal "complaints policy". After this, every complaint will be considered a gift.

The customers are the basis of the organisation's growth and survival. So it is important that they are happy...
- but this is not the sole benefit from the programme

TMI's seminar in complaint handling should be considered an investment in increased satisfaction which leads to better financial results and a better image.

Surveys show that it is considerably cheaper to keep your existing customers than to win new ones. It happens to be five times as expensive to win a new customer. Therefore, there is good reason to invest some resources in keeping your existing customers. Obviously, good complaint handling is only part of the organisation's quality strategy, and even the most effective complaint handling cannot compensate for defects and errors in products and services.

Nevertheless, complaint handling is an area that is often neglected. It is also an area in which remarkable results can be achieved. The facts given below clearly outline the importance of complaint handling as well as the benefits that can be derived from the TMI programme by both the organisation and the individual.