Handling Complaints

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

Donald Porter

Complaint handling is an essential and useful skill. Whether it is your customer who is complaining, or your client, supplier or even your colleague, you have a great opportunity to see yourself from another’s point of view. This feedback can prove to be invaluable and the handling of such criticism can do wonders for the image and productivity of your business.

It is often said that the way you handle a complaint is far more important than the solution you provide. Indeed, research shows that skilled handling can lead to long term customer loyalty. There is also an increased likelihood for your customers to spread the word and let others know about your great service.

Handling complaints well requires practice and an exposure to a wide variety of situations. This course is fundamentally designed around examples and scenarios to accelerate this exposure and help delegates to quickly go through a series of common scenarios. Critical examples are provided on how a particular situation can be addressed poorly and what better alternatives exist in handling such situations. By observing bad attitudes and conversations, delegates can quickly learn what doesn’t work and why. This helps them to remember the skills longer and apply them more successfully in real world situations.

Delegates get to participate in interactive exercises, group activities and roleplays to master the skills and become better at handling confrontations, aggressive or difficult people.

As always, the training resources contain all your need to run a course on handling complaints, including numerous exercises, workbook and comprehensive trainer notes.

In this highly practical course delegates will learn:

Nature of Complaints

• Why people complain?
• Who complains?
• What people think of complainers?
• What is the correct attitude towards complaints and handling complaints?

Listening Skills

• What types of listeners exist?
• What are advantages and disadvantages of each listening type?
• What is Active Listening?
• How does Active Listening help you handle complaints better?

Handling Complaints

• What types of complainers exist?
• What are the best strategies to deal with each type of complainers?
• What should you be aware of when dealing with each type to prevent the encounter from becoming unproductive?

Complaint Handling Scenarios

• What are the common challenging scenarios when handling complaints or serving customers?
• How to handle aggressive complainers
• How to stop people from using others as an audience when complaining
• What to avoid when handling complaints to reduce the likelihood of confrontations?
• How to deal with slow speakers
• How to manage careless remarks

Assertiveness Skills

• What is assertiveness?
• How to be assertive
• How does assertiveness differ from aggressive or passive behaviour?
• How to construct your sentences to express yourself assertively when responding to complaints

Body Language

• What are the critical postures and gestures to observe when handling complaints?
• How not to appear defensive and confrontational
• What postures to use to make the other person feel calm and cared for?
• What body language signals best suit your assertive style of communication?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Hold a positive attitude towards complaints and appreciate how they benefit organisations.
• Use Active Listening techniques when handling complaints to help establish rapport and leave a positive impression
• Respond to common challenging scenarios and handle complaints in an efficient manner
• How to communicate assertively with customers when handling complaints for a win-win outcome
• Increase the effectiveness of your communication with others using body language

This course is designed around various scenarios and exercises and as a result is highly example-driven. In our experience, the most effective way of training is to let delegates go through example after example to see clearly what works and what doesn’t. From these examples, they can infer a pattern of behaviour which is remembered for a long time afterwards and is much more effective than going through a number of bullet-pointed guidelines.

Using the principles of Accelerates Learning, the interactive exercises also help to increase retention so the skills are used much longer after the course and are more likely to become habits over time.

The course also contains specific sessions on related topics such as assertiveness and body language along with relevant exercises that further help delegates to focus on these specific skills individually. This repetition over topics, in examples and scenarios and later in specific dedicated sessions, further enables delegates to fully understand the techniques and learn the skills during the course.