How to Handle Complaints in the Workplace
When you receive complaints from employees, suppliers or customers at work, it's not wise to ignore these sentiments. Although some complaints may be frivolous, others may have merit. Certain types of complaints may give you insight into issues that, once remedied, could help boost your company's productivity or the quality of your offerings.
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Instructions
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Analyze and update your company policy as necessary. Before handling complaints in the workplace, it's important to have policies that strongly focus on customer service, vendor management and valuing your employees.
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Provide a clear-cut way to receive and process complaints from your stakeholders, or parties important to your company. For instance, consider a comment box or an email system that retrieves and saves complaints. Inform your stakeholders of how they can submit their complaints.
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Collect complaints regularly, such as each week or each month, depending on how many you receive in a short period of time.
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Sort the complaints you receive in terms of the subject. For instance, keep complaints related to your sales professionals separate from complaints about product quality issues.
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Sort complaints again in order of importance from minor to serious. Address the serious issues first, then move to the less urgent matters. Determine which matters you want to take action on and which you'll simply note as "for the company's information."
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Take actionable complaints seriously, but don't take them personally, especially if they're complaints from employees. Maintain a neutral, respectful and compassionate stance. Open your mind to the other person's standpoint when deciding how to handle the complaint.
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Decide on a plan of action for the actionable complaints, then communicate to your stakeholders how you plan to address them. Be specific. Keep your word and deliver if you make promises. For instance, if you receive a complaint from a customer regarding a glitch in the software you sell, send a communication to that person and other affected customers regarding the upcoming fix, including the tentative date.
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Keep your complaints on file, at least until you've had time to fix and monitor the progress of the problem. File them by closed issues --- action completed or closed for another reason --- and open issues that you still want to address.
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