If you’re having a bad time in life, it’s not healthy to keep it to yourself. Those feelings need an outlet. When you go to a friend or a partner to vent, what kind of response are you expecting? Most friends want to do more than lend an ear. They want to help make the situation better. They want to immediately start offering solutions. But you don’t want to hear that, do you? It makes you feel like your problem is your fault, like if you just did these obvious things, everything would be fine.

Even less helpful than immediately offering solutions is the defensive response. If you’re complaining to your partner because they wronged you in some way, chances are they’ll get defensive, they’ll make excuses, they’ll explain away their behavior.

Another not-so-helpful response people tend to have is that they’ll start telling a story about themselves. To them, it’s bonding. Commiserating says, “Yes, I know how you feel, I’ve been there too.” But now you feel like you have to comfort them rather than the other way around.

What is it that you actually want in these situations? You just want to be heard. You want to know that it’s ok to feel this way. You want validation.

Validate the Customer’s Feelings

That’s where turning a complaint into an opportunity begins. Listening to a customer complaint means validating their unhappiness. It involves taking the complaint seriously. It involves asking questions to determine exactly what went wrong and how they would like you to make it right. The power of listening and validating complaints goes beyond solving a problem for a single customer. Complaints provide valuable data, insights into how your business is perceived, how it works, and how it can be improved.

Keep the Right People in the Loop

Complaints fall into a number of different categories. Some complaints are one-off accidents: a product arrived broken or was defective. Some involve negative interactions with your employees. Others are about what you don’t do: products you don’t have, services you don’t offer, markets you don’t serve.

If those complaints about defective or ineffective products become more frequent, that information needs to be passed onto operations to discover the root cause of the problem. The result will be more efficient operations and better products.

Complaints Tell You What Customers Want

Likewise, complaints about what you aren’t doing might also reveal opportunities for your business. These comments offer insight into what customers want and what needs the market isn’t meeting. If customers are complaining about products you don’t carry, but you actually do carry them and customers just don’t know about it, then you know where to focus your marketing efforts. If you are marketing those particular products and customers still don’t know about them, then it’s time to rethink your marketing campaigns.

When you resolve a complaint in a positive manner, you’ve made a customer happy and willing to work with you again. You might even get a positive testimonial you can use in your marketing materials. “We got it wrong, but we went out of our way to make it right” can be a powerful message in the right context.

Are Your Systems Ready to Turn Complaints into Opportunities?

In order to turn a complaint into an opportunity, customer-facing staff need efficient systems for gathering this data and relaying it to the appropriate department. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems make it easy to get all of your departments pulling in the same direction. As a technology agnostic agency, we’re here to help you find the system that is right for your business and rebuild your processes so that you can address complaints quickly, efficiently, and in a way that aligns with your strategy.