CUSTOMER CARE

CUSTOMER CARE

Musings on Complaint Handling and Grievance Redressal

By

VIKRAM KARVE

An Efficient Customer Service Management System or Grievance Redressal Mechanism comprises five aspects:

1. It must be easy for you to lodge the complaint. 

This can be either on phone or SMS or by email or on the website. (In today’s world of the internet, online grievance management mechanism is a must and the days of writing letters, submitting written applications and using snail-mail are a thing of the past)

2. Your grievance must be acknowledged in a prompt manner. 

This is best done by a prompt call or SMS or an email giving you a reference token number to enable you to monitor the progress of redressal of your grievance / complaint.

3. You must be kept informed and updated regarding the status of your complaint 

It must be easy for you to monitor the progress of your complaint as it is processed in the grievance redressal system.

4. Your grievance must be resolved to your entire satisfaction in a time bound manner.

A sincere and transparent attempt must be made by the customer care department to achieve “customer delight” by a mutually agreeable reconciliation of the complaint and insidious attempts to browbeat, bully, harass or confuse the customer must be avoided.

5. Your feedback and suggestions must be sought. 

As a part of continual improvement a good customer care department always asks for post grievance redressal feedback and suggestions, acts on the comments of the customer and keeps the customer informed. Rather than just ring up the customer, it is better to obtain feedback by email or in a prescribed format. This enables the customer to give comprehensive feedback and ensures that the feedback is properly recorded for future action.

At present, we are experiencing a customer service issue with Axis Bank for the past 3 months.

We are stuck at stage 3 - we are kept informed of the status but our complaint is not being resolved. It looks like things are moving in circles.

We patiently wait for our complaint to be resolved.

Let's see how things progress. 

We hope Axis Bank values Customer Care and makes a genuine attempt to resolve my grievance. 

Maybe, it will make an interesting case study.