Customer Complaint Handling: The Importance of Employee Training for Customer Service

Abstract

Providing superior customer service and having effective and efficient customer complaint handling procedures are critical to a firm’s success in the marketplace. This paper reports on a survey of Chamber of Commerce members in a community with a population of about 65,000 people with regard to their customer complaint handling policies and practices. The findings indicate that firms which train customer service employees in customer complaint handling are likely to collect, record, and respond to customer feedback and complaints in a more systematic way than those firms which do not provide such training. These firms are also more likely to systematically communicate their customer service policies to all of their employees and customers. Overall, it seems that small businesses are at a competitive disadvantage because they tend to engage less in such practices than the larger businesses. It is recommended that managers, especially in small businesses, engage in more systematic training of customer service employees and pay closer attention to the development of formal customer service policies and information systems for tracking customer complaints.