What Are The Hidden Benefits Of Customer Complaints?

How your business can take advantage of customer complaints

As a business owner, it can be hard to focus on the negatives when it comes to your business. You believe (as you should) that your product is exactly what your customers need. You and your team put every effort into making it exactly what it needs to be. This can often mean that some businesses will ignore negative reviews and customer complaints or dismiss them as irrelevant. This is a big mistake however and in this article, we will be going over some of the hidden benefits of customer complaints.

So what are some of the benefits of customer complaints?

1 – Complaints can show your weak spots

Every product or service has weak spots. These often are not apparent at first to the business and it takes an outside perspective to find and communicate these weak spots. One of the advantages of Customer complaints is that they can really find gaps in your service delivery or technical faults with your products. Could you imagine if there was a small product fault in an initial launch which is not flagged up? You then craft a huge launch and this faulty product is sold to a much larger audience. This could have detrimental effects on your business moving forward. Listen to your complaints and you will find out many issues before they become big problems.

2 – You can influence new customers positively

Consider responding to a negative critique with an apology. When responding to a negative review with an apology you are defusing the situation. Handling an overly negative reviewer with positivity and a desire to resolve the issue will show other customers that you are an easy company to purchase services from. Obviously, you can’t remove or take away negative reviews (no company can do this.) However, you can twist this around in your favour. With all reviews being easily seen by any potential customers means that your responses will be seen by everyone as well. Positive interactions will encourage new customers.

3 – You will understand your audience and their needs much better

To understand customers you need to listen to them. The best way to know what your customers want is to ask them. By asking for reviews or sending out feedback questionnaires you can gain a much better perspective on what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your business. This will allow you to create accurate updates to your products. Which will end up selling better and helping your business to grow at a much faster rate. 

4 – Improve your customer communications

One vital area of business is your customer communications. This basically encompasses all of your interactions with your customers. From promotional leaflets to emails and texts with updates on a customer’s order. It is vital in the modern era to have an omni channel strategy in place that allows your customers to gain the information they need, where they need it, and when they need it. One of the benefits of customer complaints is that you can assess how your customer communications are performing. If a customer is struggling to get the information they need, their complaints can help you to iron out these errors and improve the overall customer experience. 

5 – Complaints help to create customer loyalty

Being able to deal with your complaints effectively will enable you to build and maintain customer loyalty with ease. A loyal customer often comes from an initially skeptical customer. The ones who really care and want to hold you accountable, are the ones that you want to hold onto to ensure the best service possible. They are saying what everyone else is often thinking and you will be able to gain the most accurate portrayal of how your business comes across this way. These customers will be loyal to your brand because they see that you are willing to take on and at least hear their feedback. Even if you don’t always agree with everything.

So we have now covered 5 benefits of customer complaints

Now it is important to always listen to your customers and ensure that they receive the best experience possible. One way to do this is to ensure that is to have customer communications management software. This will enable your employees to craft your company’s communications perfectly and with ease. Saving many hours of work. Here at Sefas we are able to offer the HC Suite of tools for this exact purpose. It is a set of 5 separate tools. All neatly working within one piece of software to enable easy access to assets, documents and to send these out to the exact audience that needs to see them. To find out more about how the HC Suite can benefit your team, please don’t hesitate to get in contact today.