Art of Complaint Handling

–  The key to customer retention

The ultimate goal of any dealership is to ensure that every customer and their families come back and buy every car they’ll ever own for generations. To achieve this goal, dealerships or companies are constantly looking for ways to deliver superior customer experiences to their customers and stand apart from their competition.

Everyone knows great customer service is very important, yet few dealerships or companies deliver it well. Why is that? The philosophy of exceptional customer service is simple but in practice, it’s usually a very hard thing to do right. To put this philosophy into practice, we must develop a service culture or service mindset at our dealerships as a number one priority.

YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE PHILOSOPHY

The most important driver of a best-in-town dealership is your customer service philosophy which moves the whole dealership or company toward its ultimate goal – Customer for Life. A great customer service philosophy provides you with a set of guiding principles for handling customers’ inquiries and complaints on your dealership floor.

Let’s look at our Customer Relations basic philosophy when I was working as a Head of Customer Relations at Toyota’s dealership.

“Satisfy customers through swift, sure, and fair handling of customer inquiries and complaints and continue to earn the trust of society as a company.”

A great customer service philosophy is more than values and gives you an excellent model of best practices.  It also gives a strong support structure for your team for guidance to make your service faster and more flexible. For example, when we, at DFSK Pakistan launched our all-new 7- Seater crossover Glory 580 Pro model in December 2020, vehicle deliveries were delayed for 3 months due to supply chain issues caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Customers were also very disappointed with the delayed deliveries. We had two options at that time: to remain unbothered by this matter as it was due to the global pandemic, not our fault, and simply apologize to customers. Second, we as a company could go to extra nine yards to apologize to them for the unexpected delay and repair their feelings by offering compensation.

So, we apologized to the customers for the inconvenience due to this unprecedented situation and as a caring automobile brand we offered them free maintenance for 1 year or 12000kms (which comes first) as a gesture of goodwill against the unexpected delay.

We set an example by not only issuing an apology to our valued customers for the inconvenience but also compensating them for the unexpected delay. This initiative was highly appreciated by customers, car enthusiasts, and the automotive industry. This philosophy also helped us to maintain a positive mindset during these testing times. This wasn’t our mistake but an opportunity for us to prove to the customers why they should do business with us.

ROLE OF SERVICE ADVISOR AS A COMPLAINT HANDLER

Service advisors or service leaders are the faces of your brand and are very important people in your dealership or company. They are carrying out your vision, core values, and service philosophy while dealing with customers on the service floor. The problems happen; that much is inevitable. The question is how you and your dealership or company will resolve that problem in a way that shows your customers that you are committed to delivering superior customer service.

According to my opinion, the role of a service advisor as a complaint handler is:

“As a customer’s first touch point, handle customers’ complaints swiftly, surely, and sincerely as per the distributor’s standards and manage the customer service experience to achieve customer delight.”

KEYS YOU NEED TO KNOW TO BECOME A STANDOUT COMPLAINT HANDLER

We are part of a high-touch industry driven by human interaction. 100% error-free service is impossible to avoid customer complaints at the dealership. How exceptional service advisors or customer experience officers tactfully handle these complaints and turn them into opportunities to enhance customer loyalty and improve overall customer experience made them invincible.

Here are some keys for service advisors or service leaders to master this art to effectively handle complaints at their workplace to become a standout complaint handler.

Acknowledge & Say Thank You

When it comes to handling customer complaints, a complaint has two parts: emotional and physical. The emotional part of the complaint is less about the facts and more about how customers feel. The physical part is customers want their issues to be fixed. So, the first key for you is to manage customers’ emotions and your own emotions before finding a solution. Service advisors must acknowledge and say “Thank you” to customers for bringing the matter to their knowledge as there is no better way to make someone feel welcome and cared for.

As far as your emotions are concerned my mentor Asad Abdullah, when he was heading the customer relations department at IMC, always said Moazzam “manage your emotions while dealing with annoyed customers when they are venting out their anger. Don’t get defensive or personal with them because they are upset due to the product or services not being from you. Control your emotions and full stop. This is where you have not only an opportunity to instantly connect and build trust with them but you can also thrive as an exceptional problem solver through your best services”.

Look at our standardized thank you note which we used in our Sales, service, and customer relations departments while dealing with complaint customers:

In-person/Telephone: Thank you very much for bringing this issue to our knowledge.

In-written: At the very outset, we hereby take this opportunity to thank you for taking your precious time to         write to us.

Apologize

After acknowledgement of the customer’s complaint, it is also important to apologize to the customers for their moments of suffering. After listening to their voice, a sincere apology shows the customers that you genuinely understand their problems and actively working towards fixing their issues. Here’s our apology statement that comes right after the thank you note.      

In-person/Telephone: I am sorry that you had this experience

In-written: We also apologize for the inconvenience caused.

It doesn’t matter if a customer is right or wrong, it doesn’t matter whose fault is this, it doesn’t matter who caused this problem, you need to apologize generously to the customer. Remember, apologizing to customers doesn’t mean that you are wrong. Sometimes, a simple apology can resolve a customer’s complaint.

RESPONSIVENESS

Service advisors or customer experience officers may encounter complaints in form of an upset walk-in customer at the service floor, an annoying telephone call, an angry email, or negative comments via social media. It’s the service advisor’s job not only to respond to complaints swiftly & surely but also to be efficient in resolving customers’ issues and making them feel valued and satisfied.

Jay Baer beautifully said in his book Hug Your Haters “Responding to customer complaints promptly increases customer advocacy and well-handled complaints create strong bonds between customers and dealerships or companies. Conversely, not answering the complaint decreases customer advocacy.”

No reply is a reply. Choosing to stay silent speaks volumes. There is a beautiful saying. “complaints are not your problem … ignoring them is”…

Empathy

Imagined whatever customer is complaining about just has happened to you. What would you be thinking and feeling? How would you react? What would you expect? What would it take to make you happy? To know and better understand the customers you need to be the first one, be the customer.

Customers may be upset about the delays with the car repair and don’t understand why it takes so long for a replacement part to arrive in the warranty.  They may be upset about the repeat repair due to poor repair quality. Vehicle repair is your area of expertise but probably not the customers and you have to treat their concerns with respect and explain why a misunderstanding may have occurred.

To be exceptional in complaint handling always see the complaint with the eyes of your customers, listen to the complaints with the ears of your customers, feeling with the heart of your customers. Walking in the customer’s shoes might just show you what they expect.

The important lesson I learned in my Toyota days, and being an exceptional service advisor or customer experience officer, our number one priority should be “We must repair not only repair the vehicle but also the customer’s feeling”.  

Appreciate Customer’s VOC(Voice of the Customer)

According to Bill Gates, Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

A very small percentage of unhappy customers raised their voices to give you feedback on what isn’t working and the way forward to move ahead to dealerships or companies. Customer’s VOC(Voice of the Customer) also enables you to take countermeasures to improve your products and service process and prevent their recurrence.  Here’s the statement which is derived from our customer service philosophy, how we appreciate our customer’s VOC(Voice of the Customers) while acknowledging customer’s complaints:

In-Person/Telephone: Thank you for sharing this. It will help us to improve our product and service level.  

In-Written: At [Dealership Name], we always take every customer complaint very seriously and our organizational philosophy is to see them as a first-hand source of continuous improvement and innovation of our products and services, leading to our ultimate objective – Customer Delight.

My question is to you:

1. What is your dealership or company’s mindset about complaints?
2. What is your customer service philosophy?
3. What approach does your dealership or company use to deal with customers and then learn from them?