Complaint Handling – 3 Part Video Series
Welcome to Suburban’s three part series of videos on complaint handling. Suburban handles complaints a little differently from other companies, and this is why we believe it is a fantastic place to work. We also believe that this is one of the ways we stand out from our competitors, and is one of the reasons why the company has great staff retention and has achieved significant recent growth and success.
Part 1 – Resolving the Issue
In part one, Tom Aldridge, Suburban’s MD covers off on the importance of listening to and resolving the issue for the client.
He states “The majority of the time it’s a simple misunderstanding, and often all the customer needs is for someone to take the time to listen to their issue and make them feel heard. We have to understand that the client isn’t interested in excuses. All they wanna know is what we’re doing about it.”
He also states that after we solve the issue for the customer, it is important to perform a thorough investigation and work out what went wrong, so that we can prevent the issue from happening again, which is discussed further in part two.
Part 2 – Investigating our Process
In part two, Tom discusses investigating whether it was a weakness in our process which caused the error, and how the correct training might help avoid the issue in future.
He discusses that some owners or managers are quick to assume it was a mistake from one of their employees, and believes that blaming a team member without finding out his/her side of the story is really unfair. He believes that taking a step back, analysing what happened to determine if there are any gaps in our process, and addressing those gaps with training and support material for the staff, is a much better way to tackle this situation.
In part three, Tom discusses how we handle when there is a performance issue with one of the staff.
Part 3 – Addressing the Issue with the Staff
In part three, Tom looks at how we deal with performance issue and the importance of talking to the staff member to identify what might be causing them to make errors and supporting them to get themselves back on track. He also discusses the importance of coming from a place of care.
Tom states “In my experience, so often when repeated mistakes are happening the person has something else going on for them that is taking away their focus… I have found by supporting the team member with the personal issue, as they move through it and get themselves back on track, they’re extremely grateful for the support that they received through that period.”
At Suburban Pest Management we’ve been operating for over 27 years. And in that time we’ve found that following this process almost always gets to the desired outcome for the client, the team member and the company.
