Designing Complaint Handling and Service Recovery Strategies

Figure 2: Customer response categories to service failures.

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.
Donald Porter V.P. British Airways

•Keeping customers informed of progress
•Considering compensation
•Persevering to regain customer goodwill
•Checking the service delivery system and improving it

7.Handling Customer Complaints
The guidelines for frontline employees to effectively handle customer complaints and service recovery include:
•Acting fast
•Acknowledging the customer’s feelings
•Not arguing with the customer
•Showing that you understand the problem from the customer’s point of view
•Clarifying the truth and sort out the cause
•Giving customers the benefit of doubt
•Proposing the steps needed to solve the problem

Effective service recovery systems should:
•Make it easy for customers to give feedback (e.g., provide hotline numbers, email addresses, and social media channels on all communications materials) and encourage them to provide feedback.

know where to complain, and find it takes too much effort and is unpleasant, and perceive the payoffs of their effort as uncertain.
•The people who are most likely to complain tend to be better educated, have higher income, are more socially involved, and have more product knowledge.
•Customers are most likely to complain at the point of service provision (face-to-face and over the phone). Only a small proportion of complaints is made via other channels such as email, social media, websites, or letters.

firm, a third party, or even take legal action).
•Private action (e.g., switch to another provider and/or spread negative word-of-mouth).
•Take no action.
2.Recovering from a Service Failure
To effectively recover from a service failure, firms need to understand customer complaining behavior and motivations and also what customers expect in response.
•Customers typically complain for any combination of the following four reasons; they want:
–restitution or compensation
–vent their anger
–help to improve the service
–spare other customers from experiencing the same problems (i.e., they complain for altruistic reasons).
•In practice, most dissatisfied customers do not complain as they may not

SUMMARY
1.Customer Dissatisfaction
When customers are dissatisfied, they have several alternatives. They can take some form of:
•Public action (e.g., complain to the

Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.