Customer Experience Management Best Practice: Take Action on Customer Service Complaints

It’s easy for ebusinesses to set up processes for collecting online customer complaints. Whether it’s through online forms or contact centers, customers are more than willing to take the time to complain about problems they experience online. According to a recent Harris Survey, 53% of users will report an issue they experienced online. The hard part is making sure that you can respond appropriately and put these complaints to good use.

The ebusinesses that I have worked with often do a great job investigating customer complaints and acting upon them. The most customer-centric of them have defined customer listening initiatives that formalize complaint resolution processes and take them to the next level. The shortcomings that I have seen in these initiatives happen when the person or team following up on the complaint can’t pinpoint exactly what the customer experienced online. Intermittent site malfunctions may be hard to reproduce, and usability problems might not be apparent until you’re in the eyes of the beholder.

Take the example of Thomson Holidays, the UK’s most popular leisure travel retailer. Last year Thomson launched a new web site to provide enhanced functionality for its one million visitors per week. After the new site went live, Thomson began receiving emails and calls from customers reporting that the confirmation screen and email they received included strange data instead of their personal information. For example, instead of saying, “Dear John” the email would say, “Dear First Name.” When Thomson’s IT team tried to reproduce the problem they were unable to isolate the issue.

Thomson turned to Tealeaf to conduct further analysis of the problem (read the Case Study). Because the call center had the names of people reporting the issue, it was easy to pick a few examples, and then use Tealeaf to replay those visits. Tealeaf enabled Thomson to discover that, occasionally, the site would malfunction between the “enter personal details” and “payment” steps in the booking process. When this happened the customer’s information would be replaced with the “Dear First Name” data rather than the actual details. The visibility Tealeaf provided allowed Thomson Holidays to halt a customer experience flaw that was increasing inquiries to the call center and eroding customer satisfaction. Furthermore, because Tealeaf allowed Thomson to view and replay affected sessions, Thomson’s IT team no longer had to try and reproduce the problem, and could instead focus on higher-value enhancements to the site.

Customer experience management best practices include formalizing the process of tracking and escalating customer issues that originate in the contact center. I recommend that you:

1. Have a defined process for what information needs to be gathered (name, account number, etc.) to find the customer’s session with a customer experience management tool. With Tealeaf for example, even anonymous sessions can be found if information unique to that session is gathered, for example what they searched for and the approximate time of their session.
2. Make sure that there is a way for call center representatives to escalate issues for investigation. Most customers use a trouble ticket system, but regardless of the system there should be a process for capturing the necessary information and escalating the issue to the appropriate team.
3. Have a person responsible for periodically examining trouble tickets to look for trends and identify common problem areas.
4. Use a customer experience management tool to search for customer sessions that demonstrate the problem area and replay these sessions to see the actual customer experience that triggered a complaint.
5. Use the insight you gain from conducting customer behavior analysis to identify the issue.

Once you identify an issue, you can then move on to refine, quantify and diagnose that issue.

To summarize, the customer who takes the time to complain is one who perceives a significant problem in your customer experience. It is up to you to build the right processes and systems to turn one customer’s frustration into many customers’ benefit.

Also, in case you missed it, we recently hosted a webinar with OpinionLab and our joint customer, hotels.com, where we discussed another best practice –- how to take action on Voice of Customer survey data -- which you may find useful to review.

-- John Dawes, Vice President, Product Management