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When To Intervene With Complaints
If you are a Sales Manger you know that providing the right sales training to your field sales and sales support staff helps to manage customer relations. This is because well trained staff are better able to prevent complaints, and if a complaint does arise they are able deal with the majority to the customers complete satisfaction without the need for you to get involved. However, there are some situations when it is best that you, as the sales manager, intervenes. This article describes six scenarios which require the intervention of the sales manager.
There will, for every company, be a time when a particular complaint goes above a certain monetary value and so exceeds the authority given to the sales staff to resolve it. When this limit is reached the sales manager will need to step in and resolve the issue. You should decide the monetary amount that would trigger your sales people to approach you with a complaint. You could base this on the total value of the order, which is easy to determine. The damage amount, on the other hand, is not so easy to decide. If you adopt the policy of only intervening in cases where the damage amount is above a certain level you could give the impression that you do not take the smaller cases seriously. It is therefore debatable whether you should only use the extent of damage as the sole criteria for determining whether to intervene or not.
Sometimes the complaint comes from a new client. If a customer makes a complaint after their first or second order, it is probably wise to intervene personally. You should contact the client and explain to them what is being done to remedy the breakdown or rectify the problem. Even if it is the new client who is responsible for the problem that lead to them complaining, you should intervene. This is because new clients are particularly sensitive if their first order with you results in difficulties of either a delivery delay or technical problems with the product.
You will be familiar with the old saying - it never rains but it pours. This saying highlights the fact that itt is never just one thing that goes wrong, rather everything seems to go wrong at the same time. When there have been repeated breakdowns or repeated issues you should intervene personally, but be careful not to take over completely from the sales person responsible for that client.
Good practice dictates that all complaints should be handled and resolved promptly. If it is starting to take too long to resolve the problem then you should step in. As the manager, stipulate a precise timeframe from taking the complaint to resolving the problem. Sales people should not exceed this stipulated deadline, if they do then the case should land on your desk. You should also make sure that your sales people are not dragging things out because of indifference on their part. If there is any delay, investigate the reasons to find out what the causes are. A complaint should be dealt with just as carefully as an order would be - thist is the foundation of an effective complaint management system and your sales training should reinforce the correct complaint handling techniques to be followed.
There are times when the client is standing right in front of your door or is asking to speak to you personally on the telephone. Do not try and get rid of them. You should step in and resolve the complaint. Never be tempted to pick up the telephone thinking “Complaints are unpleasant, cost time, money and nerves...” This is the wrong attitude. Make sure that you have the right attitude, even towards reproachful clients by reeminding yourself that complaints represent an opportunity and that the atmosphere is more important than the facts of the case.
Lawsuits are costly, so you should also intervene before a complaint gets out of hand and turns into a lawsuit. In a lawsuit someone wins and someone loses. If the client wins, you have to pay the costs. If you win, you may well have saved money, but you have also lost because you will have lost the client. Thus lawsuits are always fateful. Remember, you can still pull back from a law suit even at the last minute, indeed the courts often suggest settlement. If this is the case, you need to ask yourself whether you could have managed the case better to find a compromise without the courts?
So, to summarise, good customer relations management requires on-going sales training for sales staff that includes complaints handling so that they can manage most complaints well, and also awareness of the sales manager of situations that demand they intervene personally.
