Customer service consultant Helen Dewdney on turning complaints to long-term advocacy

Helen Dewdney is a customer service consultant and consumer expert with extensive experience advising organisations on complaint handling, customer experience strategy, and service recovery. Speaking with the Champions Speakers Agency, she explains why poor complaint handling drives churn, and how businesses can convert complaints into loyalty and long-term advocacy.

From a customer experience and service design perspective, what are the most common frustrations organisations continue to underestimate, and how should leadership teams address them?

At the moment, what consumers are telling me, amongst lots of other things, because really there is a list as long as you’re, you know, to the moon and back, is that they don’t like chatbots. You’ll hear from companies a lot, “Oh, we like chatbots.” Yeah, you like chatbots, but actually your consumers don’t. It’s making life easier for you, but not necessarily for consumers.

They’ve got a long way to go. They want to speak to a human more often than not. Quite often when they ask the questions, they’re not getting the answers that they want, and then they’re eventually having to go to speak to somebody.

So you need a really sophisticated chatbot system if you’re going to have one that actually will answer people’s questions. You don’t know the questions that people are going to ask because everybody’s case is different, and so there has to be an option of being able to speak to a human.

People are very frustrated with chatbots, very, very much so. Whatever people say, I hear that a lot. If I put up, I regularly do, “What frustrates you most about customer service?” chatbots are always, without fail, there.

Another one that people always say to me frequently is not doing what you say you will do. Now, you think in your personal life, if somebody says they’re going to come around and bring you a present and they don’t, that’s very disappointing, isn’t it?

If somebody says they’re going to take your children out and you’re going to get that break and they don’t, it’s very disappointing. It’s the same when it comes to complaints.

It’s just as frustrating if somebody’s phoned you up or written to you and said, “I want this to happen,” and you’ve said you’ll do it, like you’ll follow up within five days, and you don’t.

That makes people much more frustrated. So they’ve got their complaint, and then they’ve got their complaint about the complaint process. It’s very, very frustrating for people that you’re not doing that.

In a similar vein, it’s when people don’t take that ownership and they pass you from pillar to post. You’ve got a consumer, you’ve got a customer, who’s already annoyed with you, and you try and pass the buck, and it goes to somebody else, and it goes to somebody else.

Now I work with consumers and how to get around that, but businesses shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. They need to be training their staff much better to take ownership.

How can organisations use effective complaint handling to turn dissatisfied customers into long-term advocates and “superfans”?

Yeah, I think I sort of touched on it earlier, that if you get things right and you are open to those complaints, and you’re not just dealing with that complaint there and then with that person, but actually putting that broadly across your whole business, if you are doing that with that individual, if you are giving them good service and you are treating them as an individual, like the previous story that I told, those people will talk about you.

They will do that heavy lifting of marketing for you. From the research, you’re seeing that people are wanting to pay for that better customer service, but also they’ll talk about it. There’s that old adage, if you have bad service, one person you’ll tell 10 people, but that’s probably infinitely more now because we’ve got social media.

Probably if you’ve got a bad experience, you’re going to put that on social media and tell those people. Fewer people will talk about a good experience, let’s face it. You only have to look on review sites, and you’ll see people are more keen to talk about a bad experience than a good experience.

But if they’re going to talk about a bad experience, you want them to at least be able to say, “But they dealt with the matter really well,” so that if they do a review, you’re able to respond to that review as well.

Ask people, simply ask people. It always amazes me when I talk to businesses, particularly small businesses, “I wish we could get more reviews.” Do you ever ask them? Do you ever ask people to do a review? No. There you go. How simple is that? Ask. They can only say no. So this case is about asking people for reviews, and that’s going to do some of the marketing for you.

Certainly, dealing with the complaints really well, that will, because people will talk about that on social media. Even when people complain about a company, somebody will pop in and say, “Oh well I did X, Y, and Z, and this is how it worked for me.” Those kinds of things are great free advertising for you. It should be part of your marketing.

I think if you treat people as individuals and you’re aware of people that could be vulnerable, you don’t instantly think, “Well, that email was really rude.” You don’t know their circumstances.

If somebody has just been widowed, or if somebody’s disabled, if you go with an approach to every complaint that you receive as, you don’t know the background, and it could be this, it could be that, it could be the other, your perspective on handling that complaint, and the person who’s making the complaint, will be slightly different.

You may change the way that you respond to that complaint, and if you train the staff to handle those complaints.