Customer Complaints: 8 Common Complaints & How to Resolve Them

Effective customer service agents are skilled at listening and being empathetic. It’s important for them to have a level of professionalism, which means that when things get heated, they can take a step back and not take anything to heart. The estimated total pay for as of 2023 is $42,135 per year, with an average salary of $39,599. Driven by a passion for Customer Relationship Management (CRM), SuperOffice makes award winning CRM software for sales, marketing and customer service.

Customer support focuses on helping customers use a product or service effectively.This often involves technical knowledge and troubleshooting, addressing specific product-related issues. 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. Try these seven proven steps of how to respond to a customer complaint effectively and turn an uncomfortable situation into an excellent customer service example. When clients report negative experience with your product or service, or simply features or aspects they do not like, it provides a perfect opportunity to improve your offer.

Beyond all of this, having great customer service also shows you know how modern customers think. Today’s customers bounce from one touch point to another and head back and forth around channels at the drop of a hat. If you can be there for them no matter how chaotic that omnichannel journey may be, you’ll demonstrate that you know how they tick, and that will drive customer satisfaction. Our comprehensive customer service software helps you scale your offerings, stay flexible through change, and create meaningful connections with your customers. With features ranging from ticket routing to performance reporting and everything in between, Zendesk can help you offer an outstanding CX.

Basically, anything and everything ambiguous and human-dependent is a good target for AI to preemptively analyze. Predictive analytics allow businesses to understand customer behaviors and their various preferences at a much deeper and more actionable level. AI algorithms comprehensively analyze historical data to predict the needs of the customer, their habits, and buying intent, while also offering targeted recommendations that are much more likely to result in a conversion. Likewise, you shouldn’t forget about internal services, as in improving the conditions for your teammates. For instance, you can outsource Workday staff augmentation to a highly specialized open-source LLM, which can eventually result in the customer service department performing better than ever. Access exclusive 2024 live chat benchmark data & see how well your team is performing.

It helps keep track and respond to all customer interactions across multiple channels within the same place. Service reps get easy access to previous customer conversations and additional customer details, helping them provide tailored experiences. First, it could mean that your customer demand is too high for your customer service team. In this case, you should consider hiring more reps to meet the needs of your call center. In the meantime, your reps should apologize for the long wait times and work to ensure first call resolution.

Humans communicate with machines on a daily basis, from sending a message to speaking with Siri or Alexa, as well as Google search, grammar, and spell check. Using application models such as chatbots, virtual assistants, and client relationship management, NLP and AI play a vital role in enterprise customer care. ELIZA, PARRY, and ALICE were earlier chatbots that used simple syntax, information extraction, or classification techniques for evaluating user input and generate responses based on human-created rules [36, 45]. The precision and scalability of NLP systems have been substantially enhanced by AI systems, allowing machines to interact in a vast array of languages and application domains.

More often than not, customers value a quick first response to their queries more than a deliberate but delayed response. Omnichannel support is about offering customers an integrated and seamless customer experience. It ensures that no customer issue gets missed, and all customers enjoy a consistent support experience. Some of the biggest frustrations customers experience with phone support are long waiting times, too many call transfers, and talking to under-prepared agents. Customer support can be a tough job, but when done right, it can also be one of the key factors responsible for building customer loyalty and retention. Gone are the days when customer support and service were considered inconsequential to a brand’s sustenance and growth.

Multiple communication channels, including phone, email, live chat, and social media, ensure customers can easily reach support through their preferred method. By constantly monitoring and analyzing vast quantities of data (big data) AI can identify new trends, customer behaviors, customer preferences, common exit points in the customer journey, and much more. This monitoring activity can be applied to all channels, including social media, company websites, email, chatbot conversations, and customer support tickets. When done thoughtfully, your return policy creates confidence, trust, and security. A well-crafted refund policy makes it easy for your support agents to resolve issues quickly. Customer complaints offer businesses a unique opportunity to better understand their clients and enhance the customer service experience.

The benefits of building a customer-focused culture

Customer information matters because you won’t be able to effectively resolve complaints without having all the details handy. Ensure you’re up to speed with conversations the customer has had with other team members so they don’t need to repeat information. The more you know about the customer, https://chat.openai.com/ the better you’ll be able to personalize the resolution, too. Support agents are often the first line of defense when dealing with dissatisfied customers or consumer complaints. When your agents don’t have the right customer service skills for the job, it can leave a bad impression on buyers.

They establish and maintain strong relationships with clients, helping them achieve their goals and objectives. Often, customers may need to clearly articulate their problems, leading to frustration for both the customer and the representative. Representatives need to remain patient and ask questions to clarify the issue.

On the other hand, customers are concerned about how their data gets used and how you will protect it from cybersecurity threats. Proactive customer service is what happens when a business takes the initiative to help a customer before the customer contacts them for help. It means anticipating their needs to avoid issues from sprouting and trying to resolve problems at the first sign of trouble if necessary. 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.

Both are being used to allow customers to preview and customize products, take part in product demonstrations and training sessions, and explore new product experiences and entertainment. VR and AR are expected to help organizations resolve customer issues and differentiate themselves from the competition by offering better customer engagement. There is a common expectation amongst customers that businesses offer a fully customized, personal experience.

A good way to start the call with an angry or upset customer is to tell them that you appreciate them reaching out to you with their issue, and that you want to help them resolve it as quickly as possible. This shows that you are on their side and that you are ready to hear how you can help them. Don’t raise your voice in response to being yelled, since this might further rile the customer up and turn the call into an argument. On the left is a Macro (or template) sent by a customer service agent, which contains variables that auomtatically pull tracking information from the integration. A custom-built tracking page may require more data entry than necessary with other solutions.

During this follow-up, apologize again and make sure you’ve taken care of everything they needed. At this point, if the customer is happy, there’s a really good chance that they will be returning to you for your services and that they will tell their friends and family about you and how good your customer service is. Without their approval, your business would never grow, which is why customer service is so crucially important. All customer issues should be focused on with unilateral urgency, but when you have limited staff resources it pays to be able to prioritise. If a customer has had a bad time trying to resolve an issue, you never know what length of wait might be the final straw.

Likewise, they need to buy into that company ethos we’ve already discussed. There needs to be a clear and comprehensive set of goals, as well as a broader mission in pursuit of which people can strive. In every aspect of your business, there needs to be a laser-like focus on meeting the needs of the Chat GPT customer, and ensuring that they have the best possible experience. Everyone in the organization must be made to understand that the work they do is geared towards this fundamental end. It’s not simply a question of training staff during the onboarding process and then leaving them to do the rest.

Key practices include seeking feedback, personalizing interactions, investing in staff training, and leveraging technology. Customer service works by providing support to customers throughout their journey, from initial contact to post-purchase. It involves understanding their needs, providing omnichannel support, and having agents actively listen, identify problems, and provide appropriate solutions.

Why Now is the Time to Solve These Issues

Without the integration, you’ll have to switch tabs and copy/paste order information like tracking number, shipping address, and estimated delivery date. You might also create templated responses that answer common questions like, “Where is my order? New customers appreciate seamless experiences and are more likely to make repeat purchases from businesses that offer them. Creating a cycle of repeat business will help your business grow, so encouraging loyalty through an easy-to-use order tracking tool is a big advantage. That’s why most brands post and engage with customers on social media pages. But if you’re posting on social media and not providing support to customers who reach out via DM, you’re missing a big opportunity.

The query can be moved out of line, and the wait time for the other outstanding queries can also be reduced—improving the average response time. Customer service reps work on the front lines with current customers, often when those customers aren’t happy. This gives reps helpful insights into the customer journey so the map can be re-made or products re-designed if necessary. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Customers also expect to be delighted with above-and-beyond service, which comes from personalization.

In this case, we see an example of the company effectively directing a customer to an online resource that provides further information about the problem they have encountered. “Email auto-responding is effective at letting the customer know we’re on it while also providing a reasonable expectation as to when a human being will follow up with them to address the issue. Auto responding gives the business some lead time to prioritize getting back to customers with more urgent issues than others.” – Oliver Zak, Mad Rabbit. The wait gets frustrating, and the customer feels unsatisfied with your company’s customer support. Ultimately, they talk about the unsatisfactory experience with other people (who may also be your potential customers), and the bad word of mouth brings your company image down. The answer is simple, they’ve just been very prompt about their customer service.

Customer service is more proactive than customer support — it offers customers ideas, solutions, and recommendations for dealing with potential concerns so that they can prevent issues even before they crop up. In its traditional sense, it dates back to the time humans started trading. Meeting customers’ requirements and serving them better than the competitors to encourage good word-of-mouth and loyalty was, and remains, the core of customer support. Of course, over time, the method and mechanics of delivering customer support have evolved, as have customers’ expectations of what constitutes great support.

So, when customer complaints roll in, it’s important to hear them out because these are opportunities to improve the customer experience and prevent potential churn. These and similar organizations in other countries except for consumer complaints and assist people with customer service issues, as do government representatives like attorneys general. Consumers however, rarely file complaints in the more formal legal sense, which consists of a formal legal process (see the article on complaint). If a brick-and-mortar store will convince consumers to get off their computers and get into the store, it has to have something to offer them that is different. Stores need to genuinely stand out as a better option than online shopping, and a big part of that is the experiential aspect. Going shopping has to be fun and exciting, people will continue to head to your store as long as it surpasses the relatively monotonous experience of online shopping.

Of course, it’s not the only factor responsible for a good customer support experience, but it’s undoubtedly the main factor. Prompt response from your customer support team makes your customers feel valued and positively impacts your company’s reputation. Nowadays, customer service expectations revolve around how quickly you resolve their issues. Second is accessing real-time, 24/7 support and having conversations with friendly support agents. Many companies, especially larger ones, use more than one way for consumers to reach them. And in the age of social media, it’s become even easier to get in touch with businesses to get questions answered and problems resolved.

The HubSpot Customer Platform

Once you have your automated order tracking system set up, you’re not quite off the hook yet. While many customers will opt in for email and SMS notifications, some may ignore those notifications, lose the tracking link, and still come to your website (or support inbox) looking for the status of their order. Typically, you can automate customer order tracking notifications via SMS, app notifications, or email — we’ll cover this in more detail below. Or, create a self-service portal where customers can use their purchase order number to access order status — we’ll cover this more in a later section.

Another crucial aspect of customer support includes helping customers with timely maintenance and upgradation of systems. Doing this keeps customers up-to-date with the latest versions of the company’s services and ensures high performance and security levels. One thing that we should note here is that if a chatbot cannot resolve the query, it doesn’t mean that the query remains unresolved. The chatbot can, in fact, redirect the customer to relevant customer service agents for further conversation.

Customers may appreciate having access to information and receiving an acknowledgment email, and you build credibility by promptly addressing customer requests. Email-auto responses are the simplest yet the most valuable features for customer queries improving your customer response time. They act as a great medium to let your customers know that the query has been received and is being handled. If the chatbot accurately answers the questions, that’s another added advantage.

What are the primary tech customer support metrics?

These may include software, databases, manuals, policies, procedures, or other sources of information that can help you answer questions, troubleshoot issues, or escalate cases. Make sure you are familiar with the features and functions of these tools and resources, and update them regularly to reflect any changes or updates. If you encounter any technical difficulties or gaps in your knowledge, seek help from your colleagues, supervisors, or experts. Before you can resolve any inquiry, you need to understand what your customers want and expect from you. Listen carefully to their questions, concerns, and feedback, and ask clarifying questions if needed.

You may be serving customers across demographics, from Generation Z to baby boomers, all of whom have different communication preferences. The customer’s initial outreach is their first interaction with your customer service experience, and it’s great to start on a note of convenience and ease no matter who the customer is. To build your scripts, start by identifying common questions and issues that your support team encounters most frequently. You can then create helpful boilerplate answers with blank spots to plug in customer details using your software or other tools. Before you can test out solutions, determine what your average response time currently is (if you don’t already know). First response time is a crucial customer service metric to evaluate your team’s impact because it affects revenue-related metrics like churn and retention rates.

You won’t always be able to do exactly what someone wants, but it’s very rare you’re not able to do anything at all for them. Instead of getting bogged down by what you can’t do, do your best to find what you can.

What are the best practices for dealing with common customer complaints?

In the future, these limitations may be addressed using keywords that link to various industries. Summarization systems must understand the semantics and context of information to function properly, however this can be difficult owing to accuracy and readability issues [24, 117]. NLP-powered technologies can be programmed to learn the lexicon and requirements of a business, typically in a few moments. Consequently, once they are operational, they execute considerably more precisely than humans ever could. Additionally, you can adjust your models and continue to train them as your industry or business terminology changes [25, 112].

One way to provide a better, more immersive customer service experience is through AI. Two-thirds of business leaders who have invested in customer service AI have noted significant performance improvements. With customers firmly in control, immersive customer experiences are becoming more popular, and companies who have made significant investments in this industry shift have seen higher CSAT scores and demonstrable ROI. 61% of customers eagerly await more immersive CX, and with that, 71% of leaders plan to revamp the customer journey. The quality of a company’s customer service — good or bad — can play a huge role in a company’s success. Of consumers, 60% have purchased something from one brand over another based on the service they expect to receive.

This balances out the automation and human touch in your customer service efforts. Chatbots can perform simple tasks and help customers get the information they need. However, they should provide the option of a transfer to a human operator if an issue is too complex, and this option should be available after no more than two or three levels of automated conversation. Modern live chat tools, like Tidio, make transfers seamless, so the operators who join the chat can read the whole conversation that took place beforehand. If there are complaints about your operators, always investigate what went wrong in-depth, not with the mindset to prove them “guilty”, but rather to understand what they can learn thanks to this experience. If it’s too late, and you already received complaints, apologize about the situation, explain why the delay happened and why you didn’t inform them about this fact before.

• If at the moment you can’t help, tell them you will call back as soon as you have a solution to their issue.
• This shows that you are on their side and that you are ready to hear how you can help them.
• Handling customer complaints is not fun for most of us, but if done in a warm, professional manner, chances are both you and your customer will be satisfied with the outcome, and you’ll end up with a life-long customer.

Create a seamless experience for your customers and support team by integrating your order tracking tool with your helpdesk. By linking all shipping data and tracking information, you can get resolutions to customers faster and access all necessary information in one place. In this guide, we’ll discuss how your business can implement or improve this type of customer support and other conversational channels in your customer service strategy.

And when your customers see that you are resolving their complaints in real-time, the customer churn rate reduces. Let us now look at all these 11 types of customer service in detail, and what they are best for. Choose the ones that best suit your needs to stay ahead of your competitors.

To accomplish this, NLP employs algorithms to identify and retrieve natural language rules. The computer receives the text data, decrypt it using algorithms, and then extracts the key information. NLP can be classified into two basic components; Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) [50,51,52]. 2, and the methodologies for conducting research are discussed in Section 3, while Sect. 5, we examine the relevance of the study findings and Section 6 offers recommendations for further research.

Qualtrics reports that organizations around the world lost 6.7% of their revenue, approximately $3.11 trillion, when customer satisfaction declined due to negative experiences and consumers took their business elsewhere. Occasionally, resolutions are stalled because agents don’t listen to customers or what they really want. Encourage your team to listen actively so they can identify exactly what will lead to customer satisfaction. Connecting with a caller before you’ve reached the limit of their patience is one of the basics of customer service. A recent Zoom study found that 52% of consumers report long wait times as what contributes to a negative support experience. You can use web forms to collect complaints from your website and then use customer service software to store the complaint on each customer profile.

Or educate the customer if there’s a lack of understanding of how the product or service works. After you’ve listened to your customer’s complaint and the individual has had a chance to calm down, it’s your turn to take the initiative and get all the facts. Now is the time that you can calmly start asking questions for clarification. Between being kind, listening, acknowledging, and apologizing, you will have started gaining your customer’s trust.

Constructive complaints often highlight specific issues with products, services, or customer interactions that can be traced, measured, and improved upon. At Zendesk, we offer a comprehensive CX solution that helps businesses of all sizes minimize their customer complaints. Whether you’re utilizing automation to streamline CX operations or data analytics to resolve issues proactively, we provide the features you need to deliver outstanding experiences time after time.

You could run the tightest ship in the world, but there will be times when your business falls short of the customer service standards to which it aspires. With the rise of the internet, customer reviews, and social media, reputation management – as well as the satisfaction of doing a good job – requires you to prioritize customer service. Customer service and customer support may be different, but they frequently work together to provide a seamless customer experience, as in these examples. Poor customer support can lead to customers feeling unsatisfied, leaving negative reviews, or going elsewhere.