A Customer Service Blog

Over the weekend I was in the unfortunate position of having to call upon my British Gas Homeserve agreement as my boiler decided to go on the blink just as my family and I were settling down to watch a film, well my wife and I were settling down whilst our 1 year old was running riot around the lounge.

I called British Gas and explained the problem to them and asked for them to send an engineer out.  As we have a young child we were viewed as a priority fix and an engineer visit was booked for later in the day.

The lady on the phone was very efficient and left me in no doubt that an engineer would visit or if this became impossible for any reason they would let me know.

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A recent survey discovered that up to 96% of people who are unhappy with your organisation will not bother to tell you about it.

This is a very worrying statistic and should make anybody in customer service sit up and take note.

In basic terms this means that if 100 people were unhappy with you only 4 of them would bother to tell you about it.  Complaints should be encouraged at all times as they help to make you better but this survey shows that the overwhelming majority will not actually give you this vital and invaluable feedback which will help you improve your service.

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Over the weekend my wife and I went out for a curry.  We actually went to a curry house that I have praised in the past on this very blog for their efforts in going the extra mile and generally achieving customer delight.  They achieve customer delight in a number of innovative ways such as finding out the birthdays and wedding anniversaries of their customers and then making a huge fuss of them when they come in.

My wife and I were looking forward to our meal and had organised a babysitter for a rare night out.

We arrived at the restaurant and the usual fuss was made and we were seated at our table.  The restaurant was clearly busy even for a Friday night.

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No matter how good we are we all have to deal with complaints from time to time.  The following tips will help you to get the tone of your responses right when you are dealing with written complaints.

When we speak, our tone of voice affects what we say and produces different reactions.  We may sound sarcastic, confident, nervous, pompous or humble.

Tone can come over in writing as well, and can produce a variety of responses.  It is vital therefore to consider how we sound to our readers.

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We have all encountered difficult people and complaints but David Brent really takes it to the extreme when he conducts a role-play on an internal training course.  We would certainly not advise this approach to dealing with or indeed making a complaint!

Hopefully your methods of handling complaints are a little more sophisticated and less confrontational than Mr. Brent’s!