It is important to understand that customers who take the time to complain and give feedback to companies about their products, services or experiences are providing them with an extremely valuable service. Although complaints can shine an unflattering light on a business, they help detect flaws and improve the quality of products and services. Just as importantly, they offer an excellent opportunity for businesses to show customers how valued they are, to impress them with an outstanding solution process, and to strengthen their loyalty.

Smart companies are serious about successful complaint management, and realize the benefits of consistently providing superior customer service as it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones. In today's ever-changing business environment, customer service requests are more complex and, at the same time, the demands for instant gratification are higher. Geographically distributed offices, a myriad of compliance rules, pressure to reduce costs and the ease of customer defection all contribute to the critical need to maintain great customer interactions. Moreover, a systematic approach towards customer complaint management also generates ideas for product enhancements and new products, ensuring ongoing success.

The idea of providing good customer service and having a robust complaint handling process is easy to embrace but can be tricky to implement. Most companies already have a few practices in place to handle complaints, however few run smoothly due to some common issues:

Inflexible, Outdated Systems

• The majority of businesses still operate with fragmented IT systems. To process a customer request or a complaint, agents have to access multiple systems that are not connected by a single end-to-end process.
• One part of the complaint process may be handled by a receptionist while another is handled by an investigator who may not have all details of the case. Working with a desktop cluttered with open applications greatly slows down case resolution and leads to inconsistent customer service across various communication channels.
• Growth in social media interactions and Web collaboration has added to the company communication channel mix, making it more complex. However, most businesses are not ready to provide high quality customer support through each information outlet.
• With changing consumer demands, the number and complexity of products has increased. Existing systems do not offer the flexibility and power required to stay ahead in a highly competitive environment.

Fragmented and Insufficent Information

• In the global economy, our customers, partners, and colleagues are geographically distributed, while the need for collaboration remains. The lack of common integrated systems creates information flow barriers and makes complaint investigations difficult.
• With disjointed applications and the lack of a defined case process, there is no real-time view into complaint resolution. This usually means that agents and managers only find out about service failures long after they happen.
• Poorly designed systems can cause long lag times for complaint data assembly, and analysis causing case information to lose its relevance and use in identifying issues affecting customers.
• Lack of integration with the ERP system and absence of automated information routing from one stage to the next requires manual data entry and means that employees have to spend excessive amount of time keeping the system up to date.