When Should the Sales Manager Intervene With Complaints?

If your field sales and office sales staff have received adequate sales training they will deal confidently and competently with most customer complaints. This is important, because well handled complaints lead to better business relationships. With such staff the Sales Manager will only rarely have to step in and manage the complaint themselves. The occasions when this is necessary are described below.

There will, for all companies, be a time when a given complaint is above a certain monetary value that exceeds the authority given to the sales staff. When this limit is reached the manager will need to step in and resolve the issue. You should define the value that triggers your sales people to escalate a complaint to you. You can base this on the value of the order, which is easy to determine. The damage amount, on the other hand, is not so easy to determine. If you only get involved when the complaint is likely to result in large amounts of damage then you will give the impression that smaller cases are not taken seriously by you. It is therefore debatable whether you should take the extent of damage as a criteria for determining whether to intervene or not.

Occasionally a new customer complains. If a new client makes a complaint after their first or second order, it is best to intervene personally. Call the client, or visit them, and explain what you are doing to correct the issue. You should also get involved even if it is the new customer who is responsible for causing the problem they are complaining about. Remember that new clients are very sensitive if their first orders result in difficulties. This is true of both delivery delays and technical problems with the product.

You know the old saying - it never rains but it pours. It is never just one thing that goes wrong, everything seems to go wrong at the same time. When there have been repeated breakdowns you should intervene personally, but do not take over completely from the salesperson responsible for that client.

Customer complaints need to be managed and resolved quickly. If it is taking too long to resolve the problem then you should intervene. Stipulate a precise deadline after which you should become involved. Sales people should not go over the time frame set for receiving a customer complaint to its resolution. If they do, the case should land on your desk. You should also make sure that your salespeople do not drag things out because of indifference on their part. If there is any delay, find out what the causes of this are. A complaining customer must be dealt with just as carefully as one placing an order - that is the foundation of effective complaint management and your sales training should cover the correct complaint handling techniques to be used.

Sometimes the client is standing right in front of your door or may be asking to speak to you personally on the telephone. Never attempt to get rid of them, you should intervene and solve the complaint. Never pick up the telephone thinking "Complaints are unpleasant, cost time, money and nerves..." Make sure that you find the right attitude, even towards reproachful clients. Remind yourself that complaints represent an opportunity and that the atmosphere is more important than the facts of the case.

You must also get involved before the point at which a complaint turns from a complaint into a lawsuit. A lawsuit always has a fatal effect - someone wins and someone loses. If the client wins, you have to pay the costs. If you win, you may well have saved money, but you have also lost because you will have lost the client. You can still pull back from a law suit even at the last minute. The courts often suggest settlement. But could you not have managed to find a compromise without the courts?

So in summary, good customer relations requires on-going sales training for sales staff so that they can manage most complaints well, and also training for the sales manager so that they can recognise and respond appropriately to those occasions that demand they intervene personally.

Richard Stone a Director for Spearhead Training Ltd that runs management and sales training programmes aimed at improving business performance.