Examples of Complaint Handling That Delight Customers Beyond Measure

Thank you as always! This is Kaiun-san.
Looking forward to another great day! 😊

Have you ever had to deal with complaints at work?
Back when I was a company employee, I handled more complaints than I could count on both hands.

I use the past tense "handled" because, thanks to everyone, my work is now complaint-free.

As I have written before, I am now self-employed and interact with customers using my own unique communication system, so there are no complaints.

I would like to write about the details of that another time, but for now, I want to share one specific approach to handling complaints with those of you currently struggling with them.

In the first place, the image of handling complaints is often one of bowing your head repeatedly or bringing gifts to try and appease the customer, isn't it?

Of course, those things are sometimes necessary, but actually, something like this happened during my time as a company employee.

It happened at a company I used to work for.
One time, a customer made an advance payment for a job via bank transfer. However, they got angry because they didn't receive a thank-you call for the transfer.

Since I hadn't been informed by the accounting department when the payment arrived, I was unaware of the situation.

When it comes to money, people tend to make things difficult.
The company contacted me saying the customer was furious and even threatening to cancel the job. They really wanted to be thanked for their payment.

However, naturally, we should express gratitude for payments. If I had been notified of the payment by the company immediately, I would have certainly made a thank-you call.

This is the downside of a company organization with a division-of-labor system. The larger the organization, the more chaotic the communication network becomes.

I immediately visited the customer to apologize, but there was no sign of them calming down.
I consulted with my supervisor and decided to return to the office to discuss it with the accounting staff before trying again.

We decided that from then on, the accounting staff would make a thank-you call immediately upon every payment.

However, that was an internal improvement plan for the future, and unfortunately, it was not a concrete measure to avoid cancellation for that specific customer.

In conclusion, we decided to apologize one more time, and if that didn't work, we would have no choice but to accept the cancellation.

I went back to apologize again, but they were still not satisfied at all.

Thinking I had no choice but to let them cancel, I casually mentioned that we had implemented an internal improvement based on this incident.

"Regarding the payment from you, Mr./Ms. [Name], which you pointed out this time, we held an emergency meeting within the company and decided that from now on, our accounting department will contact and thank customers immediately upon receipt of payment. We will ensure this does not happen again. Thank you very much for your valuable feedback."

The customer heard this.
Huh? Their face lit up with a huge, beaming smile.

My guess is that, in short, they were incredibly happy that what they said was conveyed within the company and led to a company-wide improvement.
Their complaint was justified. They had influenced a company.
I think they found that feeling absolutely, uncontrollably delightful.

For people like this, pride is the most important thing.
More than any 100 apologies, more than 100 gifts, whether you bow down or pretend to have a broken bone lol,conveying a single improvement is what truly works.

As a result, we successfully avoided the cancellation, and the work was completed without any issues.

Of course, we were at fault in this case, and when improvements are needed, they should naturally be made.

It was a valuable lesson in complaint handling that taught me you shouldn't just try to settle everything by apologizing.

Please use this as a reference.
Naruhiko Kaiun

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