Customer Retention … 9 Ways Complaints Yield Remarkable Strategies

Be in touch with your customers. It is the only way to gain meaningful insights. Does your business focus on customer complaints and the problems behind them? Customer complaints are an incredibly important part of remarkable customer retention strategies and therefore the overall service experience you deliver. Here we will discuss ways to take full advantage of the information in customer complaints. But first, an important question for you.

Check out our thoughts on customer focus.

Have you ever turned a customer complaint into a future opportunity, or better yet, a customer advocate? It can be really rewarding, yes? Oftentimes, a negative experience that a customer has with your business can be salvaged and turned into an opportunity to win them over for life.

But handled poorly, and you could lose customers for life. This is such an important element of customer service that we use it as a critical element of our customer service workshops. We use it to show the power we all have to give our customers a memorable experience.

Great businesses are never built through excessive reverence of a storied past.  In an age of disruption, the only viable strategy is to adapt.

Let me share a story with you:

There is an interesting story about how Pablo Picasso, the famous Spanish artist, developed the ability to produce remarkable work in just minutes.

As the story goes, Picasso was walking through the market one day when a woman spotted him. She stopped the artist, pulled out a piece of paper, and said, “Mr. Picasso, I am a fan of your work. Please, could you do a little drawing for me?”

Picasso smiled and quickly drew a small, but beautiful piece of art on the paper. Then, he handed the paper back to her saying, “That will be one million dollars.”

“But Mr. Picasso,” the woman said. “It only took you thirty seconds to draw this little masterpiece.”

“My good woman,” Picasso said, “It took me thirty years to draw that masterpiece in thirty seconds.”

Picasso isn’t the only brilliant creative who worked for decades to master his craft. His journey is typical of many creative geniuses. Even people of considerable talent rarely produce incredible work before decades of practice.

 The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.

Related: Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?

Here are some simple recommendations I use in the workshop to help people handle customer complaints. If you and your staff follow these rules, you can turn unhappy customers into loyal cheerleaders for your business.

Customer retention strategies … listen completely

Give them your complete attention. Don’t multi-task. Don’t half- listen. Write down what they are telling you and get specifics from them. Then confirm that you understand. Focus only on them.

Deal directly and don’t hand them off

Please hold while we transfer you. Your call is very important to us.

Don’t you hate this response? While you’ll experience less of this problem when handling support via email, it’s still important to get people to the right employee quickly.

Never miss an opportunity to briefly explain to a customer why this transfer will be to their benefit. It’s hard to get any customer happy or excited about being transferred, but consider the two choices you have:

You are getting transferred. “Well, this stinks!”

You will be transferred to our ____ specialist who can better answer your question. “Well … okay, then!”

Without this relevant insertion, customers won’t know that you are actually trying to do the right thing.

Don’t be too formal

Customers want to be treated with respect, but if you stop treating customers like regular people and start talking like a corporate stiff then they won’t interpret the interaction as genuine.

Research suggests that personalization is powerful when interacting with anyone, but especially with your customers.

Remember that you’re not speaking to the Queen of England, so refer to your “chat” with a customer rather than your “correspondence” with them. Remember to speak as if you were talking with an acquaintance. A little familiarity can go a long way toward getting customers on your side.

Let them vent

Don’t interrupt. Don’t explain, defend or justify. They don’t care why the problem occurred and they don’t want your side of the story. They are angry and they want to vent, so let them.

Apologize and mean it

This is often hard, especially if you did not cause the problem. When you apologize in this situation you are not necessarily taking blame for causing the problem. You are apologizing for the customer having a bad experience. Put yourself in their shoes. Be sincere.

Complete your complaint understanding

There is a fine line between simply following up after handling a complaint and inadvertently inviting customers to complain even more.

Let’s look at the following two responses:

“Is there anything else wrong?”

“How else can I help you today?”

Asking a customer, who just complained, a leading, negative question such as #1 will lead to compounding the complaint and a mistake to avoid.

Conversely, inquiring how you may be able to further assist a customer lets them know that you are willing to stick it out if they have any other issues to address.

Be quick in response


We often discuss some pretty strong cases for spending more time with your customers, but you saw the data above … complaints are a slightly different beast that greatly degrade when slowly responded to. Work to close issues as quickly as possible. Benefits increase from complaints being resolved quickly.

A customer leaving a feature request won’t sweat the fact that it took you a day to get back to them. However, unhappy customers want resolution yesterday, so you need to make responding to them a priority.

In almost every other instance I would encourage you to slow down your service, but in this case you need to make moves to right the wrong as soon as possible!

Ask them how you can make things right. Then do more.

To illustrate how this happens, we like to use the following example. We occasionally visit Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch until a disappointment with a KFC takeout order of soggy, unappetizing chicken and fries. We called the restaurant chain’s toll-free number to complain, but was told that complaints should be directed to the specific location’s manager.  One call is worth the effort for us, but not two … especially if the company shows a lack of interest in the first call. We find it easier, given these two incidents, to find a new place for lunch.

KFC lost a customer without even knowing it had happened. You can bet your customers make “silent” decisions like this on a regular basis …so make it easy for them to complain. Don’t rely on feedback forms. Ask customers for direct, face-to-face opinions. Do it regularly and have them know whom they can complain to, if anything goes wrong. The image above is real and a great way to let customers know you are paying attention and care.

Too many employees either have no response to complaints or a generic, stock response, like taking money off the bill. But that risks making the customer even more angry if that’s not what they want done. In fact you might even offend someone by offering them a discount.

A better strategy is to ask them what they want. Most people don’t want much. They usually just want you to listen. But whatever they say, always do it and more. For example, if they ask for their meal free your response might be:

“Mr. Smith, of course your meal tonight is on the house. But I’d also like to buy you and your family dinner the next time you join us. Would that be okay?

Assure them you’ll fix the problem

Because you listened and you confirmed their complaint, you know why they are upset. Take the next step and assure them you will take action to make sure it does not happen again. Otherwise, why would they come back? (You need to fix the problem too.)

Thank them

Without direct customer feedback, we have no idea if we are delivering the experience our customers want. When they tell us we have failed, they are offering priceless information on how we can improve our business. They are telling us what we need to do to keep customers coming back.

So thank them for their help. It’s a rare customer who will take the time and effort to offer feedback. Thanking them will go a long way toward winning them back.

Revolutions such as this can be more than interesting, they can be instructive.  The key concepts of receptivity, network structure, transmission vectors, and instantaneous phase transition are just as important for innovation diffusion (or brand marketing, for that matter) as they are for political action.

Perhaps even more important is what does not play a role.  Chasing haphazardly after random followers, seeking the support of influentials (they are usually more of a symptom than a cause) and other gimmicks usually do more harm than good.

The bottom line

If your employees handle every customer complaint using these steps, you’ll keep 99% of them coming back. You’ll have a healthier business because it keeps getting better. And we all know happy, loyal customers are the foundation of a healthy, sustainable business.

Winning customers back with exceptional service is an important aspect of your business that you should focus on, but when customers already have one foot out the door let the parting be as frictionless as possible.

Customers aren’t necessarily done with you for good just because they cancel their account once, so don’t hassle them as they exit. Remind them what they’ll be missing by simply being sincerely helpful.

Need some help in building better customer service for your customers? Have you noticed the growing importance of the service you provide?  Creative ideas to help enhance your word of mouth marketing?

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas for your service to customers.

When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.

Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

 Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Check out these additional articles on customer insights from our library:

Should a Business Send Customers to Competitors?

An Actionable Approach to Target Market Segmentation