Regardless of how strong your processes are, or how clearly you set out client expectations, you are always likely to receive complaints. How you as a business handle complaints can certainly have a positive impact on the business and will certainly improve landlord retention rates.
How are complaints looked upon in your business?
I can’t claim the credit for the below method, but I was shown a diagram which became our rule on how we dealt with complaints, and whilst we still had issues, it generally worked well for us.
In the diagram above, you will see two axes, the horizontal axis is severity, and the vertical axis is fault/responsibility.
The chart is then split into four quarters, bottom left is ‘empathy’ top left is ‘hero’, bottom right is ‘fix it’ and top right is ‘roll out the red carpet’.
What I liked about this is that it clearly documented how we expected the staff to deal with a problem, dependant on their opinion of the complaint.
If the complaint wasn’t severe (to the complainant) and the fault or responsibility wasn’t the agents, then the approach we would take would be to show empathy, whereas if it wasn’t the agents fault but the issue was severe, it gave us an opportunity to become a hero. Similarly, if the issue/complaint was severe and it was our fault then we would roll out the red carpet.
This certainly isn’t fool proof, but it gave our teams a guide to what they should do.
What we also did was created a culture in the business that complaints shouldn’t be frowned upon but used as an opportunity to learn, as such we had to put a lot of work into how we personally reacted to hearing of a complaint. We added a ‘complaint fund’ into our P & L and each department were allocated an amount of money that they could spend on rectifying complaints, this helped staff understand that complaints and mistakes were part and parcel of the business. By accepting that, they rarely hid their complaints or refused to accept blame if they had messed up. By having a fund it also allowed them to produce WOW moments or become a hero by going over and above.
For more expert knowledge and advice on how to give your Agency the WOW factor book in a call with Richard
