Before your startup reaches scale, you have a lot to work out. Customer feedback, particularly complaints, can help you stay focused on what matters. For this reason, I always suggest founding teams choose an individual to consistently deal with complaints and report back. This also ensures you are hearing the information directly from your customers.
Give customers a direct line to you. Post on your website, and in other customer communications, that you welcome and appreciate their feedback. Remember, it is always better to hear from a customer with a complaint than to let them simply stop being a customer. Jeff Bezos once famously tested his own customer service to find out firsthand what kind of service his customers were experiencing.
3. Make it easy.
When unhappy customers struggle to complain, they usually just end up frustrated. They might even give up on your company without you ever knowing the reason. But when a customer finds it easy to complain, it provides you with valuable insight into the problem and you have a second chance to make things right. My favorite new way to make it easy is to include a “live chat” function on your website, often powered by chatbots. That way, digital agents can handle the majority of customer issues.
4. Track every complaint.
This not only ensures complaints get addressed, but also helps when it comes to data mining. Track how long it takes to resolve each issue and how often similar issues arise. Remember, we measure what matters, and what matters, we measure. So if complaints matter, track and measure them. It’s not only about making sure each is dealt with in a timely manner, but also learning from each one.