Lawyers and marketers don’t always see eye to eye- take for instance the marketer wanting to find a descriptive name for a product and the IP lawyer advising that a descriptive name won’t be easy to protect.  But I don’t want to talk about names here. This is about complaints, brand identity and product and service quality.

I enjoyed a great breakfast last week at a local Chamber of Commerce networking event. Our guest speaker, Michelle Pascoe, left us with many tips and food for thought about the experience we give our clients and customers and whether it is consistent with our brand such that it meets and exceeds customer expectations.  One of the questions that Michelle left us with was “What are your procedures for handling a complaint?”

Complaints Handling  procedures are not only valuable for helping us to align our actions with our branding message but are an important compliance tool.  Either way, a Complaints Handling System should be designed to meet the specific needs of the business to provide a process for:

• the collection and analysis of data;
• investigation of the issues raised; and
• communication with the customer.

Why is a well thought out and effective Complaints Handling System so important?

The Marketer

From a marketing perspective, a Complaints Handling System is an important way to understand how your clients feel about your products and services.  If you don’t give your customers an opportunity to complain, most will walk away leaving you to wonder why.  Responding appropriately to complaints will, hopefully, mean that you not only retain a disgruntled customer but can turn them into an advocate for your business rather than an influential critic of it.  Feedback also allows a business to move in the direction that the market wants.

The Lawyer

A Complaints Handling System can also help a business to meet its legal compliance obligations.  It is a valuable component of a Consumer Protection Compliance Program and is often one of the key requirements of a Compliance Program implemented under a Section 87B Undertaking. (This is an enforceable undertaking that the ACCC can require a company to give after allegedly breaching the Australian Consumer Law).

If you don’t know which of your products are unsafe or faulty you will continue to sell them, potentially causing more injury, damaging your reputation and costing you more to rectify.

If you don’t know that your employees are giving misleading information to customers, you can find yourself in trouble with the ACCC and facing significant fines or worse.

If you aren’t providing refunds, repairs and replacements when the law says that you must, the ACCC  can prosecute you.

This is where a Complaint Handling System can help.

What can an effective Complaints Handling System tell you?

The collection and analysis of complaints from customers can provide useful information, including:

Customer service

• Identify gaps in staff knowledge, training or understanding
• Identify employees who need support, further training, or have customer handling problems that need addressing
• Find out how extensive any problem is and whether it relates to an individual, a team, a shop, a State or all members of staff that are dealing with customers and their managers
• Discover what consumers understand your marketing messages to be saying and correct them when they are creating a misleading impression
• Find out what consumers don’t like about your goods or services and change unpopular components
• Identify other complaints of conduct that breaches the Australian Consumer Law or other laws affecting the business

Product quality

• Identify manufacturing or other faults with products or services early on and correct them
• Identify products or services that, although not faulty, are not of the quality that  the customer expects
• Identify if goods are potentially unsafe or dangerous so that recall procedures can be quickly instigated
• Identify unlawful conduct such as failing to provide remedies under the consumer guarantees for faulty goods.

Complaints Handling System should be designed to provide you with relevant data that, if analysed regularly, can give your business a health check so that the appropriate action can be taken before things get so bad that you start losing customers or are prosecuted by the ACCC or other regulator.

We at Ascentia Sustainability would be happy to provide further, specific advice, or assistance designing and implementing Complaints Handling Systems. You can contact me here.