7 Effective Ways to Monitor Complaints

How effectively a contact centre manages incoming customer complaints has a huge impact on its overall reputation and customer experience.

Simply reacting to and resolving individual complaints is not enough. Rather, contact centres need to monitor customer complaints proactively to identify potential (or actual) issues in their products or services.

To find out how contact centres should be monitoring customer complaints to maintain a great customer experience (CX), we asked our panel of experts for their best advice.

1. Find Recurring Issues That Need to Be Addressed First

Mistakes happen. What separates the great from the mediocre is how they respond to them.

The first step is to implement a ticketing system to record, categorize and prioritize complaints.

Over time, you will build up a database that you can mine to find recurring issues that need to be addressed first.

You should also measure key performance indicators (KPIs), especially average resolution time. Agents are on the complaints frontline, so provide them with ways to report customer concerns.

Many complaints also arise from simply having insufficient staff to handle issues promptly. Workforce management is all about ensuring that you always have the right people in their seats at the right time. If you do that, a major source of complaints is eliminated.

Contributed by: Chris Dealy, WFM Evangelist, injixo

2. Track the Hot Topics of the Week

As a result of AI developments, the term Voice of the Customer has become more literal. AI analysis and identification of keywords and phrases in calls allow organizations to track the hot topics of the day/week/month.

All this information helps plan targeted messaging and solutions, giving agents confidence when facing these issues and fast-tracking resolution for your customers.

It also proactively stops issues from snowballing into severe ones which could impact a wider segment of your customer base.

Contributed by: Grace Dawson, Business Development Representative, Odigo

3. See if Issues Are Happening at Particular Times of Day

To fix issues, you need to be able to spot trends and go into granular detail to see why complaints are happening.

For example, do they occur at particular times of the day, on specific channels, or even with certain agents or teams?

In the past, it was hard to access this level of data as contact centre reports were static PDFs prepared by business analysts and only available on a monthly basis.

Managers can now use contact centre insights to put themselves in control, using these tools to easily create their own interactive, tailored dashboards, based on what is important to them.

This increases control and allows for much quicker root cause analysis, driving faster action to fix the issues that cause complaints.

Contributed by: Astrid Pocklington, Head of Corporate Content & Communications, Enghouse Interactive

4. Use Intelligent Dashboards to Identify Opportunities to Fix Broken Processes and Deliver Targeted Coaching to Agents

Real-time reports and intelligent dashboards allow contact centres to measure and quantify complaint types, trends, contact drivers and complaints with negative customer sentiment.

Using intelligent dashboards, CX leaders can have access to in-the-moment complaint data to make the review process instantaneous.

This removes the manual aspect of complaint management, automating the process to save time and improve overall efficiency.

CX leaders can use this information to remediate complaints, fix broken processes or products, and deliver targeted coaching to agents to drive improved customer experiences and reduce future complaints.

Contributed by: Lauren Maschio, Team Lead, Product Marketing Manager, NICE

5. Create Customized Alerts to Help Prioritize Next Steps

Analysing and operationalizing data can be time-consuming. Depending on how you assign responsibilities within your contact centre, sometimes the pressure to get the job done rather than fine-tune things can be intense.

Visual dashboards with customized alerts make it much easier to balance ‘act now’ with ‘investigate later’.

Digestible data accelerates the identification of problem areas and facilitates quicker decision-making.

Getting started with data visualization and alerts is a learning curve, as there are many ways these features can be adapted to your preferences, priorities, and contact centre conditions.

Reports which are both customized and automated can ensure a balance of prompt and strategic action to boost customer satisfaction and efficiency.

Contributed by: Grace Dawson, Business Development Representative, Odigo

6. Automatically Categorize What Each Complaint Is About

Contact centres are dealing with thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of interactions across a wide range of channels.

Manually analysing these is difficult, particularly when it comes to complaints – it is the equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

Systems can be trained to analyse calls or interactions and automatically create a wrap-up report based on the conversation, and then categorize what the complaint is about.

The result is that issues aren’t identified and fixed, and therefore impact customer satisfaction and increase churn.

This is where AI can help. Systems can be trained to analyse calls or interactions and automatically create a wrap-up report based on the conversation, and then categorize what the complaint is about.

This removes admin tasks from agents and ensures consistency in how issues are described.

Rather than spending their time searching through conversations, managers can focus on identifying trends and coming up with solutions, increasing productivity and customer satisfaction.

Contributed by: Astrid Pocklington, Head of Corporate Content & Communications, Enghouse Interactive

7. Stop Treating Complaint Monitoring as a One-Off Exercise

Reviewing collected data over time is essential! This practice enables us to identify trends and track improvements in sentiment analysis and customer service.

By prioritizing actionable insights and maintaining an ongoing, adaptable complaint monitoring process, contact centres can significantly elevate their overall performance and the quality of the customer experience, ultimately leading to heightened customer satisfaction.

This customer-centric approach fosters an objective evaluation of complaint management, benefiting both the organization and its valued customers.

Contributed by: Tatiana Polyakova, COO, MiaRec

If you are looking for more advice on handling customer complaints, you should read these next:

• “Sorry for the Inconvenience” – How to Offer a Genuine Apology
• Ten Tips for Dealing with Customer Complaints
• Top Tips for Dealing with Customer Complaints in Call Centres
• 20 Great Ways to Drive Down Customer Complaints

For more great insights and advice from our panel of experts, read these articles next:

• 10 Tips to Elevate Real Time Adherence
• 7 Ways Technology Can Help Exceed Service Level Targets
• 3 Quick-Fire Ways to Get the Most Out of Live Chat
• Expert Predictions: What Will 2024 Bring for Contact Centres?

Author: Robyn Coppell
Reviewed by: Megan Jones