You know the saying, ‘An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’? That’s especially important when it comes to customer complaints. Instead of dealing with a sticky mess of trying to right a situation, nip problems in the bud before they get out of hand. If you feel like you’ve been banging your head against a wall in this area, FeedbackExpress has some seriously awesome and totally doable tips for you.
Understand What Drives a Customer to Complain
It can be pretty easy to say, ‘Customers complain because they’re unhappy.’ And sure, unhappiness is the root of most, if not all, buyer complaints. But that’s too vague, so let’s work on narrowing the answer down a bit.
What gets customers unhappy? It’s when they had an expectation in their mind of how a situation would unfold, and reality proved otherwise. It almost doesn’t matter if their expectation was realistic or not; what matters is for them is the two didn’t align. So here we have our situation (expectations misaligned with reality) — how do we stop this from happening?
Try and Forecast the Reasons Why a Buyer Would Be Unhappy
There are plenty of situations in which a buyer would feel frustrated or dissatisfied. Here are some of the most common ones, in no particular order:
- Broken promises
- Late shipping
- Damaged items
- Products not matching descriptions
- Cheap or easily broken/damaged items
- Poor customer service/support (or even none available)
- Rudeness or apathy on the other end
- Hidden fees or costs
- Confusing site layout
- Difficulty accessing products or services
- Unanswered questions or unresolved issues
Whew, that’s quite the list! And that doesn’t even include everything… But now that you have an inkling of some of the reasons that might drive a buyer to frustration and complaining, let’s take a look at concrete ways you can solve some issues before they become problems.
Example 1: An Item Was Damaged During Shipment
Once a package leaves your hands, you have very little control over it as it makes its way to the buyer’s destination. You have no idea who’ll be placing it (or throwing it!) onto a truck, what packages (and their weight) will be sitting on top of it, or if it’ll tumble down a set of stairs at the buyer’s house.
But what you can control is the shape it leaves you in. Use appropriate sized boxes so items are banging around the sides inside, secure them well with bubble wrap or other packaging material, and mark items as fragile if they need some extra lovin’.
Example 2: An Item Got There Late
Whatever shipping option buyers pick, they choose it because they feel it’s the best all-around package of speed and price. If they choose next-day delivery, they don’t care how much the shipping is because timeliness is their top concern. And if they choose the least expensive shipping option, there’s a little more leeway when it comes to arrival date — but six months later is face-palmingly out of the question.
One way you can set buyers’ minds at ease is to make order tracking as much an option as possible. This way they can see exactly when and where their order is along the pipeline. Various shipping services have their own version of order trackers in place, so utilise them whenever possible.
Example 3: It’s Hard to Search for Items, or To Pay for Purchases
Site usability should be one of your top priorities. First of all, most buyers will give up if they can’t easily and quickly find what they’re looking for. But if you’re a seller who has a bit of a monopoly on a certain product, like contact lenses in Canada, then you might hang on to some buyers who would have otherwise given up. And if you hit them with the double whammy of making the checkout process complicated, get ready for some negative words heading your way.
But really, it doesn’t have to be like this! Less is usually more when it comes to site design. Compare Google and Yahoo! The former is quite minimalist, while the latter is…not. And take three guesses which site is the more popular of the two.
Even if you truly can’t reconfigure your site design right now, the least you can do is enable mobile responsiveness. This helps mobile shoppers view a page that loads quickly and shapes itself to the specs of the device they’re using.
And no matter what your site consists of, remember to prominently display these five pieces of information on your site.
- Address/location of your store, if you have an offline store
- Hours of operation, again, if you have an offline store
- Phone number
- An email address or link to a contact page
- Links to your company’s social media pages
Here’s a bonus tip for preempting a complaint: send them an email to check up on their experience. If you can deal with it privately, you stand a much better chance of sorting the situation out before a complaint happens. And it just so happens that FeedbackExpress is perfect at coming up with professional-looking email templates that have a friendly, personal tone to them. Start your 14 day free trial now and turn those frowns upside down.
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