ISO 10002 Customer Satisfaction & Complaints Handling

ISO 10001 Customer Satisfaction & Complaints Handling in Organisations

What Are the Benefits of ISO 10002 ?

It is at least four times more costly for an organization to retain an existing customer than to acquire new customers. Organizations that lose customers need great effort and cost to compensate for these losses and regain their reputation. In order not to be exposed to these situations, we need to manage our system with preventive approach, which is the common approach of each management system.

The ISO 10001 standard provides guidance on how to act in case of customer complaints. Ensures that problems with the client are dealt with in the most equitable manner. It offers lessons from complaints to identify open areas for improvement.

In addition, it provides the following benefits;

• The organization’s ability to retain existing customers increases.
• Customers’ sense of commitment to the company rises. Loyalty increases.
• The brand value of the organization increases. This applies to both customers and shareholders.
• Shows the organization’s commitment to customer satisfaction.
• Employees become more aware of customer complaints.
• Improve the image of the organization as showing a customer-centric approach to problem solving.
• Analyze customer complaints, while expediting corrective and preventive action in the most frequent complaint issues.
• Eliminating the causes of complaints increases the productivity and efficiency of the organization.
• Monitor complaints continuously, making it easier to see areas where improvements can be made.
• Customer Complaint Management System standards can be easily integrated with the Quality Management System thanks to its flexibility.

What is a Complaint Management System

A Complaint Management System (also called conflict management system) comprises a set of procedures to address customer complaints and resolve disputes. This system is essential for every business, even small businesses, as it can ensure business success.

Some of the benefits of a Complaint Management System are:

• It helps to achieve operational efficiency and to identify trends and causes of complaints.
• It resolves more complaints through a more customer-focused approach.
• It helps to engage staff with new customer service training opportunities.
• It integrates two standards, ISO 10002 with ISO 9001, to improve overall efficiency.

It will monitor and continually improve your complaints handling process, leading to better customer satisfaction rates.

Customer service challenges

Most businesses struggle to cope with these customer service challenges:

1. They are unable to answer a (prospective) customer’s questions – Studies show that 55 percent of customers that intended to purchase a product backed out because they did not get a satisfactory response to their question.

2. Getting a human CSR (customer service representative) to answer a call – customers detest listening to pre-recorded messages and navigating through a maze of options in an IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system before they can get to a human CSR.

3. CSRs are not equipped with the right tools – looking for customer information during service calls, fumbling with inadequate tools, and asking customers questions about the information that you already have, can put customers off. The key is to use the right software and train your CSRs to use these effectively. For instance, adopting visual engagement tools equips your support team to talk to customers in real-time, allowing them to share screens, access customers’ web resources, and take the right action to ensure a fast resolution.

4. Understand the customer requirement and speak in their terms – Customers may not always understand your product features and know all the associated terminology and technology. So they are unable to articulate the difficulties they face with your product. CSRs are taught to listen empathetically to customers. They can also refer to a list of FAQs and responses to quickly respond to questions.

5. The customer service workflow is not in-line with the customer journey – A customer journey map are the steps a customer goes through when interacting with your company–from purchasing to after-sales. CSRs need to adequately address support at every stage (touchpoint) of the customer journey.

6. Handling angry customers during a crisis – Angry customers are inevitable, and CSRs should be trained to deal with conflicts or dilemmas. There are specific processes and techniques to handle angry customers. One such technique is Disney’s HEARD technique (Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, Diagnose).

7. Exceed customer expectations – The key to happy customers and customer loyalty is exceeding expectations. And customer expectations do change frequently. You can stay ahead of your customers and exceed expectations by keeping your CSRs up to date through customer feedback and with the latest market trends. Customer feedback and continuous evaluation of that feedback will undoubtedly go a long way in achieving customer satisfaction and business success. This is established through best practices and standardized processes.

To cope with these 7 challenges, you need to follow a standard like ISO 10002 for deploying a Complaint Management System to resolve customer grievances.

The ISO 10002 standard

The ISO 10002 standard provides guidance on the process of complaints handling related to products within an organization. This includes planning, design, operation, maintenance, and improvement. The complaints-handling process described by this standard is suitable for use as one of the processes of an overall quality management system.

The ISO 10002:2014 standard addresses the following aspects of complaints handling:

• It enhances customer satisfaction by creating a customer-focused environment that is open to feedback (including complaints), resolving any complaints received, and enhancing the organization’s ability to improve its product and customer service;
• top management involvement and commitment through adequate acquisition and deployment of resources, including personnel training;
• recognizing and addressing the needs and expectations of complainants;
• providing complainants with an open, effective, and easy-to-use complaints process;
• analyzing and evaluating complaints to improve the product and customer service quality;
• auditing of the complaints-handling process;
• reviewing the effectiveness and efficiency of the complaints-handling process.

In brief, ISO 10002 will ensure:

• Better customer relationships
• Continual improvement of processes
• A transparent system
• Higher levels of customer satisfaction
• Brand improvement
• Management focus