Customer Complaint Handling: The Importance of Employee Training for Customer Service

Abstract

Providing superior customer service and having effective and efficient customer complaint handling procedures are critical to a firm’s success in the marketplace. This paper reports on a survey of chamber of commerce members in a community with a population of about 65,000 people with regard to their customer service complaint handling policies and practices. The findings indicate that the majority of respondents appreciate the importance of good customer service. Furthermore, a significant portion of these firms have formal and specific procedures in place for training customer service employees, developing policies for resolving customer service complaints, and tracking feedback from customers. Indeed, many such firms hire and train customer services employees to ensure a higher level of customer service within their firms.