6 Questions to Ask When Selecting a Complaint Management System

Today’s customers no longer have to walk into a brick-and-mortar store to get their questions answered. From social media posts and emails to website forms and phone calls, your customers have numerous avenues to seek support – or voice their complaints.

To ensure your customers have a similar experience across all your organization’s various channels, it is critical to resolve issues or complaints quickly, seamlessly and consistently. An unacknowledged complaint runs the risk of losing that customer in the future, and, if you manage many complex complaints daily, you will need a solution to keep everything on track.

When determining what enterprise complaint management solution works best for you, consider these six questions to help make an informed decision.

1. Does Your Complaint Management Solution Provide Workflows to Manage Complex Customer Complaints?

Automation is critical when it comes to quickly managing and resolving customer issues, but it needs to help the process and not hurt it, as is often the case with an automated reply. An enterprise complaint management solution must be able to direct questions, issues and form submissions to the appropriate employee to facilitate the case management process and respond quickly. Whether at an individual bank branch or from a call into customer service, these workflows ensure no complaint falls through the cracks and that all departments are collaborating and operating effectively to better serve customers.

2. Does Your Platform Centralize Complaints and Act as a Single Point of Access?

Complaint management is only made more complicated by disparate systems and access points. And if your customer submits a complaint to the wrong department, it may go unnoticed by someone with the authority to solve their problem. Instead, leverage a platform that acts as a one-stop-shop for managing customer complaints. This ensures employees, can easily access the information they need and provide a quick, efficient resolution.

3. So, You Think You’re Doing an Awesome Job, but Do You Fully and Accurately Understand What Your Customers Think? 

A recent study performed by SuperOffice found that while 80% of businesses believe that they provide excellent customer service, only 8% of those customers experience superb service. To close that gap, businesses should pursue a full understanding of each and every customer journey, including complaints and feedback. One might even say the customer’s experience when a complaint is being addressed says more about a brand than any other part of the journey. Ensure your CMS does more than just orchestrate a process; it’s imperative that it also garners your customers’ complaint and feedback experiences so that you can improve your processes to better meet expectations.

4. When It Comes to Analytics, Do You Really Have the Reporting and Dashboards You Need?

Not only does complaint management include processing and resolving complaints, but it also requires employees to constantly improve internal processes for a better customer experience. Improvement is only possible by understanding trends in your complaint management activities. By leveraging a CMS with customizable dashboards and reporting, you can better organize your data and uncover insights into how quickly complaints are processed, how frequently specific complaints arise and other key performance indicators. The right CMS will also provide essential dashboards for each user, focusing on quality, team performance, case workload and social media monitoring.

5. Can Your Platform Easily Review and Manage Your Company’s Social Media Accounts to Monitor Active Feedback and Complaints? 

Businesses should engage customers wherever they are, whether in-person, over-the-phone or online. Today’s customers live increasingly digital lives, and they want to engage with their favorite brands via social media. This also means airing their complaints in the new “public square.” Your complaint management system must be able to integrate with your various social media feeds to track all customer feedback and help you respond quickly to avoid a potential crisis.

6. Have You Considered the Total Cost of Ownership?

The cost to maintain and change homegrown systems, or bend solutions that aren’t fit for purpose into a CMS is high, and that doesn’t account for the pernicious cost of being bumped down the priority queue when a change is required. A good CMS will empower the business to be in charge of their own destiny, enable it to be responsive and dynamic without the need to rely on costly vendor support or be ‘stack ranked’ against other demands on scarce internal IT resources. 

A Solid Choice to Manage Complex Customer Complaints

If you answered “no” to any of the questions above, it may be time to consider a new complaint management system. Aptean Respond is an enterprise complaint management solution that supports every role and individual on your customer experience team. Whether frontline employees, managers or executives, configurable workflows and user-friendly dashboards empower your staff to enhance customer interactions, accelerate complaint resolution and capture actionable insights.

Aptean Respond’s intuitive, process-driven tools and dashboard easily speed up case resolution, enable better responses to complex complaints, and provide critical data for process improvement - all in a way that your current solution is not built to manage.

To learn how Aptean Respond is helping organizations around the globe manage and enhance their customer experience, contact us.