When a Bad Customer Experience Is Just What You Need

There are times when your marketing campaigns may need a bit of a boost, or you think you’ve tried all the promotion routes available and then you are hit by a customer complaint. Don’t panic and hide your head in the sand. You should celebrate, as this is the opportunity your company has been waiting for. While complaints aren’t to be celebrated in themselves, it is what you can do to remedy the complaint that can benefit your company. An opportunity to turn a bad situation into a good one is an opportunity not to be missed. However, you need to make sure that the complaints-handling team in place are skilled in the best possible customer service to start the ‘repair’ process from the minute they are contacted. Having a complaints process which is difficult and makes the customer feel stressed will make matters much worse. Good customer experience can sometimes go unnoticed and unappreciated, simply because that is what the customer expects. So a poor customer experience which is turned into an excellent one is going to be much more effective and memorable. It will be a talking point for good word-of-mouth promotion, which is hard to generate at the best of times. A complaint handled well can become a great case study for your marketing team to develop. A complaint can give you the opportunity to show that you can listen to customers and act on their comments. You can demonstrate that their bad experience is not standard practice for your operations, and you can more than exceed their expectations as you proceed to set it right. Customers will respond well to a company that shows it cares and can admit it has underperformed or got something wrong and genuinely wants to make amends. A complaint handled well can turn the customer into a more loyal customer than they were before they had the experience which caused them to complain. A complaint is only really going to go from bad to worse when those in the wrong fail to recognise it and refuse to do anything to repair the damage. Complaints should be welcomed as direct prompts to service improvement, which would normally form part of your continuous-improvement process. By challenging ‘the way things are done’, complaints can bring about a change in organisational behaviour with far-reaching effects. Investigated thoroughly and analysed to develop the best solutions, they can be the catalyst to lift an organisation’s overall performance and enhance the customer experience for all. If you have an eye for a great communications opportunity, or you can see benefits where others only see disaster, then a career could be waiting for you in the marketing industry. Speak to your local marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham to see how you could apply your skills to various elements of the marketing mix. Registering with marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham could be the start of an exciting new career.