Customer Complaints: 8 Common Complaints & How to Resolve Them

We will be reviewing the interaction as a team so that we can learn from it and provide better service to our customers in the future. When you get one of these types of complaints, it’s important you let the customer know you’re taking it seriously. Acknowledge their message and offer reassurance that it won’t happen in the future. You should also review these cases to see if there’s a learning opportunity for the agent. Last, it’s probably best if someone other than the original agent responds. Some modern teams shy away from traditional live support options like phone support, but many help desks offer live chat solutions, which aren’t as resource intensive.

You may also want to consider monitoring any satisfaction ratings you receive on the conversation in your customer service software. Negative feedback may be a sign that there are still issues that need to be addressed (though there will be times that you’ve done everything you can do and the customer will still leave upset). You can be proactive about customer complaints by learning from customer feedback and implementing changes that improve the customer experience. Agents must cultivate a professional customer service voice to diffuse situations with measured responses. In the end, not all customer complaints will be resolved to the customer’s satisfaction, and some customers may still walk away upset.

They will return to you again and again, thus, boosting revenue and profits. The old adage “The customer is always right” is not 100 percent true in today’s customer service realm. You do not have to put up with being called names or being customer queries threatened. With the many social channels and forums available on the internet, there are a lot of opportunities and platforms for customers to share feedback on. If this happens to you, own up to your mistake and don’t lie about it.

My issue is not resolved

Create stronger connections with your customers and find new ways to market to them with our suite of CRM tools. The alternative to “permanent, pervasive, and personal” is “temporary, specific, and external.” In this light, negative interactions become more manageable and actionable. In some cases, it may even be worth reaching back out to the customer after a few days have passed to make sure that everything is resolved. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Many customers will continue doing business with you after they’ve been dissatisfied and complained.

Whether you’re dealing with a complaint, a question, or a request, our templates will provide you with the guidance and structure you need to deliver outstanding customer service. To help you respond to unhappy or frustrated customers more effectively, we have created a collection of 62 customer service email templates. These templates will help you communicate with your customers concisely and empathetically. When responding to a frustrated customer via email, it’s essential to approach the situation with empathy and professionalism. Start by acknowledging the customer’s feelings and apologize for any negative experience they may have had.

AI tools that are actually useful for productivity and customer success

A well-equipped or self-service knowledge base can save your customers the trouble of reaching out for every minor issue, freeing up your customer service team to deal with more complex queries. Customer service teams focus on providing the best possible CX before and after a customer purchases a product. They also specialize in customer retention and solve complex issues that frustrate customers. The customer service team is the face of the organization and the frontline when customers require assistance.

You can send out customer surveys at various touchpoints during a customers’ journey, including after onboarding, after every support interaction, after a purchase, etc. Like customer reviews, social listening can help you understand what your customer expectations are, and where you’re falling short in meeting them. Customer reviews on third-party product review websites can provide you in-depth insights into how customers perceive your product as well as your support quality. It also helps you gauge how you feature in comparison to your competitors.

No matter how frustrated or high-pitched a customer might go at the time of conversing with a service agent, it does not give the rep the license to be rude to the customer in any way. This is possibly the worst-case scenario for a business where the customer service rep has been rude to the client. You can’t deny that this is a tough situation to handle and is best avoided under all circumstances. Your customer service problem-solving starts by diving due importance to listening.

The short answer is that customer support is important because support agents are key for helping resolve customer queries quickly and effectively, and driving customer satisfaction. This ultimately impacts customer retention, customer lifetime value, and brand reputation. Chatbots are also gaining in popularity for customer service and support teams. Like web self-service, customers can use chatbots — over the phone, website chat apps and social media messaging apps — outside normal business hours.

For example, you can find answers to questions like how visitors landed on your website, what they were looking for, at which point did they bounce (or convert),and much more. With this information, you can then implement corrective strategies to improve customers’ support experience by introducing live chat, improving your knowledge base, etc. Customer service teams often also have to collaborate with other functions including engineering, sales, and marketing. Without understanding customers’ experiences and expectations, you won’t know how to serve them.

On top of that, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has only aggravated the situation, forcing many promising small businesses and startups to shut shop. One of the most important customer support trends for the future is the efficient collection, analysis, and application of customer data. An example of responsive support includes help offered to a customer experiencing an issue with a particular feature or tool after they reach out to your support team via email or call. Responsive or reactive support is support offered when a customer reaches out with a query or complaint. Unlike anticipatory or proactive support, responsive support cannot prevent issues before they crop up.

• Ensure that everyone in your company, every goal you set, and every decision you make, places the customer in the centre.
• These templates will help you communicate with your customers concisely and empathetically.
• If you’ve gotten one complaint from one customer about one specific issue over the last 10 years, that issue might not be worth addressing.
• It might be extremely difficult to do, you must stay calm when handling a customer complaint.

No one wants to call customer service repeatedly because they didn’t get the right answer the first time. They expect to reach customer service agents who understand the products they use and how they work and accurately provide information on them. It’s more important than ever to handle customer complaints carefully, as customers have a lot of power in the digital world. If a customer complaint isn’t properly addressed, this could lead to the customer writing a negative review of your business online or posting about their negative experience on social media. Once online, a customer’s negative feedback can be seen by hundreds or thousands of potential customers, and this can drive away business and hurt your brand’s reputation. At Zendesk, we offer a comprehensive CX solution that helps businesses of all sizes minimize their customer complaints.

Save time and get great ideas with one of our free customer satisfaction survey templates. No matter how proactive you are, you’ll never be able to get in front of every customer issue. To make sure you learn about all the experiences your customers have, create an easily accessible way for them  to give feedback.

This also includes a willingness to learn, as providing good customer service is a continuous learning process. These days, many businesses are replacing human customer service with Artificial Intelligence (AI). While this technology has its benefits, it can also be frustrating for customers who require specialized attention that AI can’t provide. Tech like QLess and other customer journey management platforms allow businesses to better dictate the physical experience.

Ecommerce customer service teams can resolve these common customer complaints and problems with the right tools and training. Ecommerce thrives on its ability to delight customers through swift, seamless service and great products delivered to their doorsteps. Customer complaint responses will help you understand how the customer feels. And loyal customers will be your best brand ambassadors to create future growth. Explain the steps and procedures you will take to resolve the issue, and set realistic and clear expectations. Make sure to follow through on your promises, deliver the resolution in a timely manner, and ask for customer feedback and satisfaction.

Whatever the case, make sure to record all customer complaints for future use. But, simply implementing these technologies will not help a company, unless skilled resources are hired. Chat-bots at present have limited capabilities and thus human interference is essential. Even with the manned chat support, it becomes difficult for the customer service representative to decipher the problem and emotions behind the chat. These investments are of no use if the customer problem or query is not properly understood in the first place.

Email responses that are jargon-heavy or vague can make customers frustrated. You need to empathize with customers and most importantly, know how to account for non-verbal communication cues. Book a free demo of SuperOffice Service and we’ll show you how to manage, track and respond to your customer base. In order to understand what you need to improve on, start documenting the comments and complaints to find patterns and trends that are recurring.

Similarly, if your products cater to an older age group, phone support should be the focus. Back in the day, in order to have their issues resolved, customers had to reach out to a single point of support contact that brands provided. Today, however, customers can choose to contact brands via their preferred channels, be it email, phone or social. Omnichannel support helps streamline and simplify this process for both, customers and brands. Customer surveys are the most simple yet often the most effective way of understanding and what customers like and what they don’t.

The third reason for why speed matters is that if you don’t respond quickly, your customers will contact you through another channel – essentially doubling your workload. To answer that question, you need to calculate your first response time (FRT). Without them, you don’t have much of a business – so it’s important to keep them happy.

Since all the questions are in one place, they don’t have to struggle to find them. At the same time, your customer service reps will also have more time to deal with urgent customer queries. We also have a complete guide to approaching social media customer support. Companies must remember that great customer support and service, and eventually, customer success is a constant work-in-progress. They require a team that is driven, motivated, and rewarded for their efforts.

You can build a support community where users interact with each other and solve each other’s issues. The term customer success first originated in the ’90s but has gained greater traction over the past decade, especially in the world of SaaS. When used strategically, customer testimonials are an excellent means to establish and demonstrate credibility in your brand, thereby enhancing your company’s image. Remember, you may want to download and customize these review response prompts if you find yourself spending too much time responding to reviews each week. This is on you to listen carefully, draw connections between complaints, and determine if larger action is warranted.

If the customer has time-sensitive needs, try to resolve the case in the first call but don’t waste time repeating steps or researching irrelevant information. If your reps don’t have the answer, they should ask politely to follow up and explain why that process will yield a faster resolution. Find out what integrations are available that you can implement with your customer service software.

A very important and viable solution here can be an updated knowledge base that the support reps should have access to as and when they need it. This will reduce the chances of inadequate or incorrect information being passed by reps to the customers. That’s a great customer service problem-solving example that anyone can refer to.

This knowledge base feature helps respond to customers through chatbots and is intelligent enough to answer like a human. So the customer behind the screen feels like he is interacting with a human. An integrated helpdesk and ticketing system that organizes, collects, displays customers’ previous calls and queries helps a customer service agent deliver the best support for an angry customer. Even if a case needs to be elevated to a senior customer service agent, they should be briefed before a call is transferred. Studies have shown that nearly 70% of customer churn can be avoided if customer service can solve their issues when they make that first call.

Sprout Social reports that more people are using social media to contact support. Among them, 22% percent expected a response in 2-12 hours, 22% expected a response in 1-2 hours, and 13% in less than one hour. Ensure members of your staff are monitoring social media and responding quickly to customer service requests. Here’s what you need to know about keeping your customers happy, meeting their expectations, and building a growing base of satisfied customers.

It is about creating platforms that allow customers to communicate, exchange data, and switch between different legacy systems seamlessly, thereby enhancing their experience. Gone are the days where merely meeting customers’ expectations was enough. So, as a business, you’re faced with two choices; either hire more agents or force your customers to wait longer periods of time to get their issues resolved. Responding to customer complaints is never fun, but it‘s part of the job. Taking the time to develop a strategy for responding to these complaints and handling each incident with care shows your customers that you value them.

Even though you may not know when you will have the product available again, you can help satisfy your angry customer’s impatience by telling them that you will let them know when you get it in. When trying to find a solution, give your employees enough freedom to make judgment calls independently. Passing an upset customer up a chain of command may only make the situation worse, so it’s important to avoid it when possible.

They can help the company fine-tune its strategy to customers’ needs, ensuring it’s a win-win for both parties. Maintaining a record of customers’ details is key to offering them tailored and personalized customer service. According to Salesforce’s State of Connected Customer Report, 66% of consumers expect brands to understand their individual needs. I would highly recommend going above and beyond when remedying customer complaints. Consider offering some kind of incentive to give your business another chance, like a coupon or gift certificate. This will allow you the opportunity to win back the customer by providing them with a better experience.

One of the most agitating experiences customers can face is heading to a retailer and finding themselves standing in an extended line with an unknown wait time. This is universally loathed by customers, and these long physical lines are exclusive to brick-and-mortar stores. Few things can make customer satisfaction drop more than long wait times, which make it increasingly difficult for customers to walk away with a positive experience. Always base your customer mapping on research that will help your service agents to understand the customer experience from the outside-in. Remember to capture the entire journey and always highlight the key moments that push your customers to stay on the course of their purchase path.

This makes it much less likely that they’ll do business with a competitor. Keep these best practices in mind the next time you go to respond to a review, a tweet, or have a conversation with someone who shares feedback with your business. This step is particularly important for online reviews, which contain much less back-and-forth discussion (if any) compared to complaints made over email, on the phone, via social media, or in person. This also offers insight into how your customer service team feels about working conditions and compensation, opportunities for career advancement, training and their peers. We’ve also compiled benchmark engagement data to help you understand how your employees’ engagement compares to other companies. Don’t forget to follow up after a problem is solved to be sure that the issue remains fixed and that your customers are satisfied with the service.

To avoid such a situation from arising, the support staff must be trained to assist customers with the most common support issues. At times when an agent needs to transfer a customer’s call, they must not ‘blind transfer’, ie. Transfer the call without verifying whether or not a designated agent is available to assist the customer. Customer support agents must solicit feedback from customers at every stage of interaction with them. According to Microsoft’s 2017 State of Global Customer Service Report, 77% of people view brands more favorably if they reach out to them for feedback and implement it.