ABSTRACT

Companies sometimes think that they are doing well without paying attention to their customers are complain, only to discover later on that customers were dissatisfied and haven’t returned. It is better to encourage them to complain even about the petty things, than to wait until things become really bad. Often the complaints simply arise because the customer doesn’t feel he has been “treated right”. It may be astonishing to note that: the reason why large percentage of customers change suppliers may have less or nothing to do with the quality of the product or service. It was because customers feel “the company did not seem to care and did not communicate with them. They feel they were being taken for granted”. The first thing the complaint is looking for is a sympathetic ear.

Handling complaints is probably the most common form of customer care problem and there is a standard procedure for dealing with it. May customers see the way an organization handles the complaint as the test of commitment to the things being practiced and preached about customer care.

The major objective of this work is to establish the relevance of customer complaints and how services companies have fared or failed in handling customers’ complaints. In order to achieve the above aims MTN Nigeria was used as a case study. Research questionnaires were designed and administered.

Hypotheses tested were on the significance of:

The benefits accruable from proper customer complaint handling and good customer relations.

The findings of the research were presented in narrative and tabular forms, using simple percentage (%) and tested by chi-square (x2) and proportions methods.

The findings of the study revealed that there are significant differences in the operation, benefits and perception of customer complaints handling service oriented companies in Nigeria.