Great customer service drives sales. We pride ourselves in customer retention, but do we take steps to manage how well we handle customer complaints so we can measure our retention efforts?
We take calls of different types every day. Some of these calls could be classified as complaints. Successfully tracking these calls can be done by creating a custom activity type that allows everyone answering your phones to create a history thread on the path to resolution, and of course, retention.
From the Schedule menu, click Manage, then Activity Types......
Click on the Add button, and in the Add Activity Type dialog box type out "Complaint", browse for and select an.ico (icon) file, and Edit the two default Result Names and Add two others (shown below).
We use the prefix "Complaint" on each Result Name for reporting reasons we will look at in Part 2.
Now when the phone rings with a customer requiring attention, you simply create a History record on their contact record (keyboard shortcut CTRL-H), select the new Complaint activity with a resolution of "Complaint Inbound". Each subsequent action taken (Complaint In-Process) will eventually lead to a final result of Complaint Resolved (here marked as the default), or Complaint Unresolved.
Use this feature to add other activity types specific to your own sales, marketing, or operational requirements.
NOTE: For robust complaint tracking contact me to help you create a custom table that would add more detail and reporting options, showing you search criteria, groupable/sortable/filterable list views connected to any/all top-level entities in your database.
