photo credit: star5112

This is the thirteenth in the series of interviews with business leaders in the ‘customer’ space, leading authors, thought leaders and general all round good guys and gals, that I think that you will find interesting and helpful in growing your businesses.

Previously, in Social CRM, Customer Centric and Agile Business, I spoke to Laurence Buchanan who is Head of CRM & Social CRM at Capgemini here in the UK.

Today, I wanted to Michael Hill of complaintsrgreat.com, a business that specialises in helping businesses manage customer complaints better.

Our discussion focused on managing customer complaints and why that is essential in creating a customer centric business in the modern world and covered issues like:

• Why a back to basics approach can be the best solution
• Why customer complaint management is not all about technology
• How complaint resolution is only a part of the customer service picture
• How problem resolution and complaint handling is really hard to automate
• Empowered employees can really help when managing customer issues
• Commitment to change a culture has to come from the top but that change can start anywhere in the organisation.

How we handle customer complaints is an essential skill when it comes to building better relationship with your people and your customers so the subject of this interview is very close to my heart. I’ve written a number of other pieces focusing on complaints and you can check them out here.

About Michael (taken from his LinkedIn profile)

Michael is the founder and Managing Director of complaintsrgreat.com – a company that was set-up in 2000 to champion the benefits of effective complaint management. He has given talks, around the world, on the benefits of designing and implementing effective customer feedback management processes and has contributed several articles on breaking down the barriers to complaining, business-to-business complaints and why companies can gain from well-handled complaints.

His expertise and knowledge of complaint handling originates from previous careers as a successful complaint investigator, front-line housing finance officer and also IT help desk adviser – within both financial and local government sectors.

He has worked with many businesses reviewing customer feedback processes, conducting research and benchmarking, auditing feedback schemes, providing independent investigations of problematic cases and advising companies deploying business-wide customer feedback management software.

Finally, he is also a judge for the UK’s National Customer Service Awards, Board Member of the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals (SOCAP in Europe), committee member for the British Standards Institution’s Customer Service Committee and Independent Complaints Reviewer (ICR) to Metropolitan Home Ownership.

You can find out more about Michael on LinkedIn here, connect with him here on Twitter and check out his blog etc on complaintsrgreat’s website here.