A company PR disaster can be a customer support leader’s worst nightmare.
Picture this: You are the head of a large customer support team. You step into the office one morning and the whole scene is chaos. The phones are ringing, emails are flooding in, and customers are posting negative comments online. Your platform has crashed and your team is confused about how to handle customer complaints.
They should turn to your customer support playbook. A playbook is crucial to helping you and your team understand how to handle customer complaints and how to avoid further damaging the company’s brand image.
Creating a customer support playbook
Creating a support playbook on how to handle customer complaints is a strategic choice. The content, however, should be both strategic and tactical.
Strategic plays help your team win long-term
A well-thought-out strategy in your playbook should provide a framework for answering overall, core questions for your team. Higher-level strategic plays incorporate your team’s overall purpose and mission as they relate to the company and how you will achieve your goals. Lower-level strategic plays outline the initial moves to make before tactical plays.
Higher-level Strategic plays
The following suggestions should serve as a guide for the tactical decisions you make later on. Below are some tips on how to handle customer complaints:
- Ensure your team is properly trained
- Outline best practices for dealing with PR disasters
- Invest in the right tools for your customer support team
Lower-level strategic plays
What types of strategic plays should you make after discovering a disaster that has occurred? Below are the initial steps for you to take as a leader before you help your customer support team:
- Understand the challenges
- Understand the solutions
- Clearly communicate to your team
Both levels of strategy are just as important as the other. These strategic plans provide the core layers of your playbook and help you add tactical plays within a specific framework.
Tactical plays help your team win at the moment
Now let’s pivot from strategic to tactical outcomes. After ensuring that the matter is clarified internally for a company crisis, below are three plays to implement during a disaster with real company examples for your support teams to gain insights on how to handle customer complaints.
1. Communicate on social media
Bugs have been appearing in NBA 2k19, a basketball simulation video game recently launched on September 7, 2018. Currency issues, never-ending games, and progression errors are all problems that customers have reported. Complaints have flooded in about the variety of issues across platforms. On September 9th, 2K Support tweeted:
2K tweet
Customers responded to the tweet:
Customer reply – Kai B
YS
In addition to tweets, customers have also posted about 2K customer support on public forums:
Forum post
What 2K did right
2K Support has been active on Twitter, acknowledging the issues and encouraging customers to reach out with their ticket numbers.
Helpful 2K
The team also provided suggestions and articles for dealing with common problems. In addition, 2K pinned the following tweet to the top of its account, letting customers know about live chat available 24/7:
2K live chat tweet
2K Support recognized that many of their customers are on social media. They proactively began posting updates and responding directly to customers through the platform.
Takeaways
This example reinforces the value of social media communication during a customer support crisis. On your own customer support social media accounts, try to:
- Let the customer know that you recognize the problem and what you are doing to fix it.
- Actively respond to customer concerns (automated messages are easier, but personalized is more effective).
- Direct the customer to helpful resources such as support articles.
2. Take an organized approach
On Valentine’s Day in 2014, many customers who had ordered flowers for loved ones from 1-800-Flowers received an unpleasant surprise. Flowers and candy were either not delivered or were in rough condition upon arrival. Unhappy customers began sharing about their botched Valentine’s Day on Twitter.
Anthony
Adam WK
Adam Layer
Leaders of the company cited the weather as a major issue with the orders. Customer support representatives also responded to a number of tweets with apologies and directions to get in touch.
Janet
According to CNN Business, one customer waited on the phone for three hours without getting in touch with a representative and received an automated email to his complaint on the website. The refund and rescheduled delivery were eventually sorted but not before the story had been shared. Others tweeted similar stories:
Valarie
Matthew Warren
What 1-800-Flowers did wrong
Customers complained of “difficult-to-reach service representatives, half-hearted solution attempts and still-unresolved issues.” That’s not how you handle customer complaints. A clear, organized plan for prioritizing customers could have helped with this.
1-800-Flowers could have done a better job structuring how they would deal with customers to ensure no customer complaint was overlooked.
Takeaways
Organizing and clarifying a set of steps for customer prioritization will save your team time (and stress!). Below are several ways to ensure that each of your customer’s complaints is addressed:
- Prioritize complaints in order of urgency.
- Monitor each ticket’s status.
- Document customer complaints.
- Follow through and follow up.
3. THG – Be transparent, honest, and genuine
147.9 million consumers are believed to have been affected by the Equifax data breach in 2017. The company discovered in late July 2017 that their system had been hacked and information, such as consumers’ social security numbers and addresses, had been accessed. Equifax did not make the information public until almost a month and a half later, but posted the following to Twitter on September 7:
Equifax tweet – Sept 7
Customers responded angrily to the tweet:
Jim
Teresa
Equifax received numerous one-star ratings on ConsumerAffairs after the incident and customers posted about the poor customer support:
Arthur
Robert
What Equifax did wrong
Granted, the problems with this company go well beyond customer support. On a company level, Equifax hid important information from consumers. However, on a support level, Equifax did not do a good job being transparent or respecting the customer.
Here is a hands-on tip for the Equifax team to understand how to handle customer complaints.
It could have been a great opportunity for Equifax to make an offensive play. Rather than having to go on the defensive (responding after mistakes had been made), the company should have quickly informed and addressed customer concerns in a way that made customers feel more secure and confident in the company’s efforts to fix the problem.
Takeaways
No matter the situation, the customer deserves a respectful experience from your team. Below are the best practices when dealing with difficult customer complaints:
- Apologize – The customer is upset. Your team member should sincerely apologize for the issue and take responsibility. Customers appreciate when a company admits they are wrong and that they care about the situation.
- Be respectful – This is difficult when the customer is angry. Your team member should listen carefully and reiterate the specific problem back to the customer. If the customer needs to be redirected to another department, give the reasons why so they don’t feel like they are being handed off.
- Give realistic solutions – Don’t offer solutions that your team can’t follow through on. No one appreciates an empty apology — you need to make it right. If your team members can’t offer a solution at the moment, make sure they convey to the customer that they are working on a solution and will follow up as soon as possible.
A winning playbook on how to handle customer complaints
Let’s recap.
As summarized, having a strategy in place is a proactive way to avoid customer support backlash later on. Strategic plays include:
- Outline team training and best practices for PR disasters, and invest in proper tools for your team.
- During a crisis, understand the challenges and solutions and share the problem internally.
From a tactical perspective, remember the following plays:
- Communicate the issue on social media and outline how customers can best get in touch with customer support.
- Organize a list of steps to prioritize customer complaints.
- Remind your team to treat customers with care and respect.
In the end, you should have an overall guide for your customer support team to learn how to handle customer complaints, including steps to take during PR disasters. Knowing how to effectively deal with customer complaints on both a strategic and tactical level will not only help the reputation of your customer support but also the whole company.
