Service Recovery
Part of Complaint journey design
Making a complaint route easy to find
Put complaint routes where customers need them and reduce the information and accessibility barriers to raising an issue.
Customers should not have to post publicly or hunt for a regulator to learn how to raise a problem. Place the complaint route near order history, contact details and help pages, labelled plainly as “complaint” or “problem with an order”.
Test discovery from the customer’s position
Ask someone unfamiliar with the site to find the route from a product page, order email and mobile account screen. Count the steps and note dead ends.
A generic contact form may work if it clearly accepts complaints and gives an expected response. If it routes only to sales, it is not a useful complaint path.
Offer a reasonable alternative to a digital form, especially when the complaint concerns access to the account itself.
Keep the first submission short: identity and contact method, what happened and what outcome the customer seeks.
Invite supporting documents where useful, but do not make a receipt or photograph a universal gate to being heard.
The business may already have the order record.
Australian government business guidance recommends making it easy for customers to complain or give feedback. It also recommends having a procedure staff can follow.
Give the customer a confirmation or reference they can use to follow up. Make sure staff recognise the route as a complaint rather than a general enquiry.
Review where complaints actually arrive. If customers repeatedly use social messages because the formal route is hidden, improve the route rather than treating those contacts as exceptions.
