The following online article discusses a method of how to resolve customer complaints. If you have a customer service complaint or question, please feel free to email help@myquicksupport.com for assistance or click here to visit StoresOnline Customer Service site today.

Resolving Customer Complaints and Conflict with the L-E-A-R-N Technique

Handling customer complaints is an important part of keeping your business healthy and profitable. If you want your customers and clients to come back again you must meet and exceed their expectations consistently. When that doesn't happen you end up with a complaint --- if you are lucky. A typical business hears from only 4% of its dissatisfied customers. The other 96% quietly go away and 91% of those will never return. A complaining customer is trying to help you understand where you failed to satisfy his or her expectation. In the restaurant industry when a customer leaves without expressing a complaint it is referred to as "silent customer's revenge." The owner never knows why the customer was unsatisfied --- so there is no way to correct the problem. A recent customer service study revealed that 68% of dissatisfied customers leave because of an attitude of indifference toward the customer by the business. How are you treating customers? If you are not sure you had better start asking.

You should be thrilled and delighted that your client or customer cares enough about you and your business to take the time to complain. The good news is that 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favor. If you can resolve it instantly, 95% will do business with you again.

After twenty-five years as a team development consultant I have developed a simple, straight-forward approach for handling customer complaints and conflict. It is known as the L.E.A.R.N. technique. Each letter of the word "learn" stands for a particular action. Kathenes suggests that a majority of business owners, customer service representatives, and even spouses fail to follow critical steps in resolving conflict and complaints. Here are a few easy steps to get to the root of the problem and to find out how to make that client or customer a "repeater."

LISTEN: Close your mouth and listen. DO NOT INTERRUPT!! Let him or her blow off steam, get it out, and, as psychologists and facilitators say -- "vent." Sometimes that's all they really need to do. The complaint they have may not be the real problem. It may have been the spark that created the fury.

EMPATHIZE: Put yourself in their shoes. Take time to understand just how they feel. Then let them know that you understand their feelings. Empathize ---do not sympathize. There is a difference. If you saw a man ready to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge you can empathize or sympathize. If you sympathize, you tell him how sorry you feel for him and try to talk him down. If you empathize, you really feel how he feels, so you either jump with him or you push him off. Actually, by understanding how your customer feels and letting them know that you understand their point of view, you rebuild the rapport critical to good service. That does not necessarily mean that you agree with them. It does however let them know that you care and understand their point of view.

ASK: Ask them what they would like done. Great negotiators always know what the other person wants. The only way to find out is to ask. You will usually discover that they want far less than you thought they wanted.

REASSURE: Reassure them that you will do what you can to resolve the problem. Sometimes resolving the problem is beyond your control, but you can do a great deal for the business relationship if you genuinely try to solve the problem. You do not have to commit to making any changes, but your customer or client must know that you do wish to fix the problem.

NEVER FORGET TO FOLLOW-UP: If you drop the ball, you compound the problem. Pick a specific date for resolution, or when you will respond. Then stick to it.

It takes about 6 times more effort and money to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. By looking at complaints as an opportunity to build a stronger relationship with clients and customers, you build your business on satisfaction and service. For many businesses, service is its only competitive edge. Let customers know you care and want to hear the bad news as well as the good. It will put you light years a head of your competition.

StoresOnline encourages entrepreneurs and small business owners to read The Entrepreneurial Imperative book.

The notes provided below outline the ideas that Mr. B. Matheson took from the book. We share this book review with you and encourage you to begin your journey to online entrepreneurship with StoresOnline.

Entrepreneurial Imperative by Carl J. Schramm – Summary & Notes Provided by B. Matheson

Chapter 1 – The Entrepreneurial Imperative
Carl Schramm writes about the state of our economy and how without entrepreneurship, Americans can't win in the global economy. Everyone has similar technology at this point and we can't compete with manufacturing costs in places like China. That being said, "entrepreneurship is America's competitive advantage, and we need to exploit it fully both at home and abroad."

There are four major areas within our national economy that he thinks particularly can influence entrepreneurship in America and describes how each needs to change to encourage the growth of entrepreneurial activities: large corporations, government, universities, and start-ups.

Examples of how these four areas can become more entrepreneurial:

Corporations need to focus more on strategy and ideas in the entire world - not just a particular region/state/country, etc. They compare them to start-up companies which are good at having strategy as a main focus rather than marketing, sales, and service all the time. This allows them to execute new strategies before their competition. They need to be taking more risk with innovation instead of concentrating on sales of the traditional products.

Universities need to focus their learning on entrepreneurship and help groom the student experience to create their own businesses. It is also encouraged for universities to own businesses similar to the way medical schools own hospitals.

Chapter 2 – The Entrepreneurial American
Americans are different from the rest of the world because we are all descendents of immigrants which makes us aware of the “land of opportunity” sentiment for both ourselves and our ancestors. We have painted the picture of a frontier horizon and we can always “go west.” People always have new chances to start over. These ideals allowed for people to take risks. If it works out, that is great but if not, move on to the next venture.

Our uniqueness stems from the founding fathers debates that we would be different both politically and economically. Ben Franklin and Alexander Hamilton believed technology would differentiate our commercial life. This joint political and economic experiment evolved into a democratic capitalism model.

“Our ability to build and maintain the world’s most successful economy is directly and intimately connected to our individual freedom, our confidence and ambition, and our ability to take risks (knowing that if we fail, we can always try again). We are a nation of entrepreneurs! It is our birthright and treasure. Ultimately, it is more important to our future than any other single characteristic or asset.”

Without entrepreneurship, the United States will fall behind the rest of the world and damage the link between economic growth and individual freedom. The world is increasingly looking to the US economy and study it for the keys to growth and expansion. Even with recent problems in the economy, we are still strong with a GDP increasing an average of 3% each ear because of our ability to adapt into new forms, develop new institutions, and support new concepts of how capitalism should work.

Chapter 3 – Our Lazarus Moment: An Entrepreneurial America Reborn
In the 1970s, the American economy was a bureaucratic capitalism and was nearly a state managed, socialistic state. The free market was ending however the US turned around back towards entrepreneurial capitalism. In the 1950s and 1960s bureaucratic capitalism was at its peak. The economy was described as “big” – big government, big bureaucratic companies and big unions. These three forces created an iron triangle that was designed to create steady growth, low inflation and job security. This failed because they couldn’t provide the growth needed to lift the economy. After this the iron triangle transformed to the entrepreneurial ecosystem (the four major areas of influence).
There were three categories of factors that caused change:

The Reemergence of the private sector enabled Wall Street to supply more risk capital from the creation of junk bond financing which made capital available to ventures and forced management to start thinking about what was best for share holders. The large firms were forced to restructure to be more responsive to marketplace changes. IPOs grew from less than 100 in 1979 to more than 700 in 1987.

The personal computer revolution facilitated collaboration with people located in different offices, new industries and innovations developed in software, infrastructure, and took new directions in finance, mathematics, statistics, etc.
The “knowledge worker” appeared in the 1990s.

The Internet is attributed to making the American economy truly entrepreneurial because it allows new products and services to be developed at a faster rate, reduces search and learning costs, and permits large numbers of people to have instant access to information for their creative processes. Mass produced goods forced companies to concentrate on consumers. When goods are hard to come by manufacturers can dictate what people will buy.

Today children are encouraged to “be like Bill Gates” as opposed to getting a “safe, secure” job. “In previous eras, technologies, technological innovations and entrepreneurship drove charges and progress in bursts. Now, primarily because of technological advancements, innovation is smoother and we enjoy extraordinarily high rates of entrepreneurship.” “We need to incorporate entrepreneurial traits inside all businesses.”

Chapter 4 – The Entrepreneur
The entrepreneur is defined as someone who undertakes personal economic risk to create a new organization that will exhibit a new technology or innovative processes that will generate value to others. “The start-up firm, the home base of the entrepreneur, is the single most important unit of economic activity in our system.”

Currently 10s of millions of Americans are involved in starting their own companies, own their businesses or play leading roles in newly created businesses. “Every year hundreds of new books are written by management gurus and business school professors, all designed to help those who run large firms do their jobs more effectively. Yet the critically important entrepreneurial firm remains very much a mystery.” The entrepreneur is neglected in the economy by economists and policy makers however they are playing a huge role within the economy.
Startups are critical because:

Chapter 5 – Entrepreneurs are from Venus, Managers are from Mars
The top companies in the US have disappeared from the lists. The reasons attributed to this are that there is a constant push from new companies underneath. They are recently created and change the nature of the market with their new innovation. It is also difficult for an established firm to respond to substantial competitive threats even with money and resources.

Professional managers’ motivations are to meet achievable and predictable levels of growth. They don’t take risks and are content with modest results. The owners/founders are driven by the need to succeed and take greater risks in their business decisions.

“It should be clear that one of management’s biggest challenges is to keep the organization self-renewing, to keep its original entrepreneurial spirit. After all, every large company was once the creature of an entrepreneur.”
For large companies, the key to success is a balance of human capital, ideas and financial capital. They need to develop if four characteristics:

Chapter 6 – Universities and the Entrepreneurial Imperative
Universities should be at the heart of entrepreneurial capitalism but they are not because they graduating students that aren’t as prepared as they need to be, they are too bureaucratic, they are confused in their mission and they aren’t teaching very well.

The modern university is one of the most important institutions to entrepreneurism. They were developed not to pursue learning and knowledge as an end but to cultivate the inclination and ability to serve others and their communities. Early on the emphasis was on sciences to develop immediate solutions to problems. Now universities are losing that emphasis because:

Business schools need to focus on where the economy is headed and not where it used to be.

Chapter 7 – Exporting Entrepreneurship
We need to encourage entrepreneurship in developing countries to enable them to achieve long term growth and productivity. With entrepreneurial growth, it is thought those forces will be major factors for global stabilization.