Tips To Handling Customer Complaints

A reader comments: "Our customer is claiming that we are not staffing the contract to their satisfaction. Under the agreement our job is to clean the facility with whatever resources necessary. Do they have a right to question our staffing plan?"

Please read other comments related to this question. There are times when it is best to simply acknowledge the customer's legitimate concerns and be responsive in a proactive manner. I highly recommend you focus on their concerns and not get caught up in arguing about points that may be important to you, but not to the customer. We have documented that staffing was off and the customer was right that it was impacting performance in a negative way. We also documented that much of the equipment was either antiquated or in need of repair/replacement.

If you will implement the CAP (corrective action plan) I suggested, you will be able to get control of the discussion and use this as an opportunity to prove to the customer they have the right cleaning service and that there is no need to put this contract out to bid. Once you have proven yourself to the customer and have him/her satisfied that the corrective actions are permanent and not just a knee jerk reaction, you then can address concerns about storage, closets, matting, etc. since they will usually want to maintain these gains.

One thing lacking in your program is a Quality Control inspection process that documents valid complaints and when they were corrected. Also you need a 0-100 QC inspection system that scores key areas on a regular basis. Of course the QC inspections should be objective and indicate what steps were taken (training, different processes, etc.) implemented to keep the incident from happening again.

We will continue with these thoughts in a future article.

Your comments and questions are important. I hope to hear from you soon. Until then, keep it clean...

Mickey Crowe has been involved in the industry for over 35 years. He is a trainer, speaker and consultant. You can reach Mickey at 678-314-2171 or CTCG50@comcast.net.