Dealing with customer complaints can represent a significant cost to the average direct-to-consumer (DTC) eCommerce retailer. Axel Market was designed with sellers’ considerations at the forefront, and our exclusive features facilitate responding to customer complaints in order to maximize return for our sellers. If you’re a first time seller, then here’s a guide on How to Handle Customer Complaints efficiently to maintain your brand and company’s reputation.

Response Time

As a general matter, eCommerce best practices dictate that customer complaints should not be ignored, even when they seem petty or unreasonable. One of the most important factors in successfully resolving a customer complaint is to respond quickly. Axel Market provides sellers with several tools to ensure that customer complaints do not go unnoticed or unaddressed.

Create Policy

As a starting point, sellers should establish a clear policy for dealing with customer complaints, so that similar complaints are addressed similarly. Ideally, if possible, customer complaints should be resolved in the first contact. This is not always possible; however, in the interest of efficiency, sellers should try to avoid investing unnecessary time and energy into resolving customer complaints. Complaints that require repeated interactions to address will often necessitate annotating the customer file with the issue and the interactions with the customer over time, all of which can be avoided if the complaint is handled successfully, right away.

Collect Background Information

Sellers should also take the time to collect all the relevant background information about the complaint, in order to address it most appropriately. This means that the first response to a customer complaint may be simply to rapidly acknowledge the complaint, assure the customer that it will be addressed in a timely and thoughtful fashion, and to request whatever additional information may be required to fully assess the complaint.

Resolution Focused

Beyond establishing the relevant underlying facts, sellers should quickly identify what resolution the customer is seeking. For example, are they seeking a replacement, refund, store credit, etc. A good customer complaint response policy will provide for the appropriate resolution depending on the underlying circumstances.

Additionally, it is crucial that a seller honor whatever commitments they may make during the course of the response process. This is why it is so important to collect all the relevant facts before making any commitments.

Understanding Feedback

Finally, customer complaints provide a free source of customer feedback about the experience, and may help to identify issues in a seller’s processes that may be affecting other customers and reducing seller income. A successful customer complaint response policy will include not only addressing the issue with the customer who complained, but addressing any outstanding issues with the seller’s store or processes, which may be affecting other customers. This will also have the effect, over time, of reducing the frequency of complaints in the first place!