Complaint Handling Training

Overview | Complaint Handling Training Course

Complaint handling training is a course designed to turn your team’s most challenging conversations into their greatest opportunities. Research from Gladly shows that 92% of consumers would stop buying from a company after three or fewer poor service experiences, highlighting the high stakes of getting these interactions right.

This course is built around the Service Recovery Paradox. This is the idea that a customer who has a problem that is solved exceptionally well can become even more loyal than a customer who never had an issue at all. This means every complaint is an opportunity.

Managers who have also taken management training are better placed to support their teams through these moments, ensuring consistency and confidence across every interaction.

The skills taught are essential for frontline staff feeling the stress of angry customers, support teams dealing with technical frustrations, and any professional who has to deliver bad news. As a specialist in this field, MTD Training is a provider of complaint handling training that equips your people with the confidence and a clear process to follow.

Course Content

Here is an example of an in house, customised course we can run for you. We can deliver this course exactly as it is below, or we can tweak it to suit your requirements.

Service Mindset for Complaints

• Understand why effective complaint handling protects loyalty and reputation.
• Set clear standards for ownership, accountability, and pace of response.
• Recognise the cost of poor handling and the value of recovery done well.

Communication that Calms and Reassures

• Use clear, empathetic language to reduce emotion and build trust.
• Apply active listening and questioning to understand the full picture.
• Summarise and confirm facts so the customer feels heard and understood.

Understanding the Issue

• Separate facts, feelings, and expectations to identify the real problem.
• Assess impact and risk to decide the right level of response.
• Manage internal communication so colleagues stay aligned and informed.

Resolving Complaints Professionally

• Choose appropriate remedies that are fair and proportionate.
• Deliver apologies that sound genuine and maintain confidence.
• Handle challenging behaviour while staying calm and in control.

Follow Up and Continuous Improvement

• Close the loop with clear next steps and timescales.
• Capture insights to prevent recurrence and improve processes.
• Create a simple action plan to apply the learning back in role.

Key Features

Complaint Handling Training

Gain the skills to turn complaints into opportunities. Practical, interactive sessions equip you to manage unhappy customers with confidence and care.

Embed the Learning

We help you apply complaint-handling techniques back on the job so responses are consistent, empathetic, and effective every time.

Certification

All our solutions are assured by the Institute of Leadership and Management and are CPD-certified, ensuring the training meets high professional standards.

What Learners Say

Learners report that improved complaint-handling reduces stress, improves customer satisfaction, and strengthens relationships. See independent feedback in our Feefo reviews.

Ongoing Complaints Support

All participants gain 3 months access to our Skillshub eLearning platform plus email and phone follow-up to build confidence.

Similar Learners

Best suited for those who regularly handle feedback, complaints or difficult customer situations. Many share similar experiences, making the training highly relevant.

FAQs about Complaint Handling Training

What Is Complaint Handling Training?

Complaint handling training is a course that gives your team a reliable, step-by-step process for managing customer dissatisfaction professionally and effectively.

It goes beyond simple advice like ‘be polite’ to teach the principles of Procedural Justice. This is the idea that a customer’s satisfaction is determined not just by the outcome, but by how fair they feel the process was. Because complaints are often the most difficult customer interactions, this training works hand in hand with customer care training to ensure teams can manage both everyday enquiries and high-pressure situations with equal professionalism.

Key skills covered include de-escalation, active listening, and problem-solving. These are taught through popular and effective methodologies, including the LAER model and principles of Nonviolent Communication, which give your team a clear structure to follow in a stressful situation.

MTD Training is a provider of complaint handling training, and we deliver it through in-person workshops which last between 1 and 3-days depending on how interactive our client wants. The aim is to build the competence and confidence to turn a negative situation into a positive, loyalty-building experience.

What Does The Training Cover?

The training covers three key areas: how to manage the customer’s emotions, how to diagnose the real problem, and how to find a practical solution.

These skills mirror the type of people-focused techniques taught in a leadership training programme, where managers learn to combine empathy with structured problem-solving.

First, you’ll learn how to handle the emotional side of a complaint. We teach you how to use Tactical Empathy to manage a customer’s frustration. By calmly acknowledging their feelings, you can de-escalate the situation and bring the logical part of their brain back into the conversation.

The next area of the course teaches you how to use structured questioning and active listening to get to the root cause of the issue. This helps you distinguish between the customer’s stated “want” and their underlying “need,” which is critical for finding a solution that truly satisfies them.

Finally, you will learn the LAER model (Listen, Acknowledge, Explore, Respond) as a practical, repeatable framework. This gives your team a clear process for collaboratively finding a win-win solution and following up effectively to ensure the customer is happy.

What Are The Key Benefits?

The key benefits of complaint handling training are increased customer loyalty, better staff retention, and a stronger brand reputation.

Research shows that an unhappy customer is far more likely to share their bad experience than a happy customer is to share a good one. This course teaches your team how to turn a complaint into one of those positive stories that people share.

The training also addresses the high staff turnover common in these roles. The work of constantly managing customer frustration, known as ‘Emotional Labor’, is a primary cause of burnout. By giving your staff a clear process and the confidence to handle difficult situations, you reduce the personal stress of the job. These skills also feature strongly in a management skills course, where managers learn how to support their teams in high-pressure roles and build resilience across the organisation.

Finally, the course helps you turn complaints into a valuable asset. Every complaint contains free, unfiltered feedback about your products or services. The training teaches your staff how to be ‘insight gatherers’, listening for the root cause of the problem and providing your business with intelligence you can use to make real improvements.

Who Is This Training For?

This course is built for people in a few different situations.

For Frontline Staff: It is for the frontline customer service representatives, support agents, and administrative staff who are on the phone, email, or chat every day. The training gives them the confidence and a clear process to handle any interaction professionally.

For Technical Teams: It is also for your technical teams. These are the experts who are brilliant at solving a customer’s problem but may struggle with communicating that solution to someone who is non-technical or already frustrated.

For Managers and the Business: Finally, the training is for the manager who needs to improve their team’s performance metrics, like customer satisfaction scores, and for the HR leader who wants to establish a consistent standard of service excellence across the entire company.

Make An Enquiry

Please call us on 0333 320 2883, email us at info@mtdtraining.com or complete our form below with any questions that you may have and we will get back to you.