How To Cope With Customer Complaints

As an esthetician, you are always improving your skills and service – and you are always learning. When a customer first makes a complaint try to take a step back. Customers get angry for all sort of reasons. How you respond can make all the difference.

Let’s face it, talking to an angry customer is never easy.

So what is the best way to deal with Customer Complaints?

• “The customer is always right”. While you may have a different opinion to the client’s negative review, it is important to make them feel seen and understood. They expressed their opinion as a result of their perspective of the experience. So they are right (even if they’re not). Use a negative review as an opportunity to educate the customer. Apologise and turn their experience around.

• Always respond as soon as you can – don’t get defensive and leave it too long as you will just make it worse. Acknowledge the bad review and explain what you’re going to do.  Ensure their experience will be better in the future.

• Share reviews and feedback with your team – even the bad. The best way to develop and improve is to be transparent with everyone involved – clients and staff. This reduces the chances of it happening again

• If the bad review is online, try and reach out to the client privately as well as responding publicly. Responding privately will make the client feel heard. This allows you to rectify the situation. This can be noted in the public response where you can also demonstrate your excellent customer service skills.

• Don’t delete bad reviews – 85% of clients intentionally seek out bad reviews as well as good. They want to get a whole picture of a company. Clients may be put off if you DON’T have bad reviews.

• If you don’t handle customer complaints they are likely to spread negatively word-of-mouth.  Resolve a situation so they can talk about it positively (or not at all).

Stay Positive

Bad reviews are inevitable – you can’t please everyone all the time. You can learn how to respond to them professionally. Customer complaints are never nice to hear, and you may not even deserve them … but they are a great way to learn and grow.