How to resolve conflicts with customers

Even the most prepared and organized moving companies will face an inevitable (and dire) day of conflict during the move. How do you resolve conflicts with customers professionally, actively, and responsibly? We have outlined many situations and offered advice on how to use conflict as an opportunity to demonstrate your worth and ability. Here are some tips from Verified Movers.

When something goes wrong …

Above all, take responsibility for the problem and stay solution-oriented. Your clients will feel comfortable seeing you deal with the situation immediately, paying attention to keep moving. Even the best companies make mistakes and accidents happen.

• If your company made a mistake, apologize, and offer a solution. Offer free amends or add some bonus service whenever possible; Your client will be happy and taken care of.
• If damaged, document it immediately. This makes it clear to your client that you are ready to take charge and find a solution that works for everyone. Document the damage correctly on your bill of lading and use the procedures your company has established to recover damages.
• Even a well-planned move can run into unexpected obstacles. Street closures, back-up traffic, lift closed or broken – take charge of the situation and reassure your client that you are ready to complete the move.
• If your client was wrong? Don’t make them feel bad or wrong. Instead, offer to help them find a solution. They probably have little experience with moving, so they don’t know how things work. With kindness and understanding, explain what needs to happen, and together you can find a solution.

How to handle arguments

Unfortunately, moving can be stressful and some clients will be upset if things don’t go as they hoped. If you encounter a conflict with a client, you should do the following:

• Pause to resolve conflicts with customers. Before trying to respond in a hot moment, allow the client to fully express themselves. This gives you a chance to catch your breath and gives them time to calm down a bit and feel like you’ve heard their concerns.
• Speak slowly without raising your voice. You want to reduce the escalation of the situation, so stay as calm as possible.
• Use “I/we” statements, not “you”. Statements with “you” can sound accusatory – “you should have emptied the chest of drawers before the movers arrived” – and are likely to make your client defensive when he feels wrong. Using “I/we” statements such as “We recommend unloading the furniture before moving” sounds friendlier and gives you the opportunity to explain your point of view to the client without blaming him.
• Avoid the word “No”. Nobody really likes to hear that, and it can make you seem rigid and cold when what you really want to say is, “Actually, we will …”. When you inform a client that there are items you won’t relocate, inform them about the different options that are available instead.

Document everything

Whether it’s damage, plan changes, or actual disagreement, make sure you document everything that happens, including what you said or promised to the client when the problem occurred. This will provide you with a proper backup later in the moving process in case the customer makes a statement that doesn’t match what actually happens. It also ensures that your company can properly contact the customer to ensure they are happy and taken care of.

5 steps to resolve conflicts with customers

Anyone in the moving business can tell you that no matter how hard you try to make every customer happy, some complaints will still come up. Anything from being late to damaged furniture and everything in between – the local relocation companies are prone to complaints. It’s not always a bad thing when you receive a complaint here and there. It is how you deal with these complaints that the satisfaction of your customers and the company’s success will depend. Here are 5 steps to resolve complaints.

Don’t take it personally

When a client has a complaint, they may not always be professional or courteous with themselves. They may shout and yell at you and your employees, and will not be the most polite. As a business owner, you must accept this as part of running your business and communicating with the public. Obviously, they are going through hard times.

Seek to understand

Listen to what they have to say and try to understand what the real problem is. They will often call with a list of complaints, but by giving them the opportunity to talk and ask questions, you will find that there may be only one small problem that is easy to fix.

Be timely and responsive

When you first hear about a complaint, try to resolve it as quickly as possible. There will also be times when you need to figure out what happened to your employees and you need to contact your client. Make sure you call them back whenever you said you would call them back. Even if you don’t have an answer yet, be responsive and call them back with any new information.

Resolve the complaint

This may seem obvious, but you may not always be able to resolve the complaint when the client is satisfied with the solution. The idea is that you don’t want it to linger. So first try to fix this problem keeping your customer is happy. But if you can’t, you still need to decide what you’re going to do and close the file.

Internal fix

Complaints can be a great opportunity to see where you need to improve and what can be changed in your company. After each complaint, always ask yourself what you could have done better, who needs more training, and what adjustments need to be made to your process.

Having a complaint resolution process in your company can really help make it easier to handle complaints and improve customer satisfaction. Nobody wants to deal with complaints, but they do happen. The better you are prepared for the standard way of dealing with them, the faster you can resolve conflicts with customers and get back to business as usual.