Customer complaints: Definition, examples, and resolution tips

To begin with, here’s a tabular presentation of everything the 11 types of customer service can and cannot do. In this article, we have curated a list of the different types of customer service, what they are and what they can and cannot do for you. When it comes to unhappy customers, a speedy response goes from being a nice-to-have to a necessity. Taking responsibility for shortcomings and acknowledging consumer frustrations—even when dealing with difficult customers—demonstrates that your business values integrity. Similarly, being reactive to upset customers can quickly degrade the situation into an unpleasant experience for all parties involved. If your organization offers support on only one channel, customers are likely to complain, especially if it’s a channel that’s inconvenient for them.

Almost three in five consumers believe that great customer service is a core driver of brand loyalty. Customer service is the practice of providing help and support to both new and existing customers. On the one hand, customers want businesses to use their information to provide personalized experiences (as long as businesses are transparent about data collection).

• Two-thirds of business leaders who have invested in customer service AI have noted significant performance improvements.
• This allowed customers to find information on their own without a human needing to respond.
• It fosters product innovation and development, improves marketing performance, and enhances the overall customer experience.
• This allows agents to find the relevant details about each customer, including their current and past concerns, contact information, and purchase history.
• But, on the flip side, it’s also easier than ever to keep in touch with your customers.

When you find a great customer service employee, it’s important to communicate that to them. Show you trust their skills by empowering them to resolve issues on their own, with the right tools and access to information, of course. The customer may be angry or pleasant, have a simple or complex issue, or maybe ask a question the representative has never had to answer before. Agents who take it all in stride and handle each call with confidence and expertise are an asset to your company. You can also learn more about customers’ sentiments toward your company through external sources.

Another way to help agents meet expectations for fast support is through automation. You can repurpose these workflows on your self-service channels to help customers complete a process on their own, too. For example, you can walk a customer through the steps to initiate a return.

This study reviewed earlier studies on automating customer queries using NLP approaches. Using a systematic review methodology, 73 articles were analysed from reputable digital resources. Customer expectations are high, which is why it’s important to respond as quickly and timely as possible. Implementing help desk & ticketing software can significantly enhance efficiency in addressing customer queries. With streamlined ticketing workflows and automated processes, agents can promptly assign, track, and resolve tickets, ensuring that no customer concern falls through the cracks.

Download our customer service philosophy template to build one that guides your support team. Showing empathy is one of the most important customer service skills businesses must master. This means engaging in active listening and fully understanding your customers and their problems—not seeing them as an annoyance to handle but as the hero of your story. Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT, as the name suggests, is a key performance indicator used to measure how satisfied your customers are with your products and services.

Put customers at the center of your decision-making

If you still want to include that human touch, provide these templates to your customer support representatives. Your support team could have access to several email templates or how-to manuals covering the most typical themes of inquiry, saving them the time and effort of creating a new email for each customer support request. The gap in perception between businesses and customers about customer service delivery indicates that companies need to do better because the customers are clearly not satisfied. In a research by Bain and Company, it was found that 80% of companies in the US believe that their customer service is superior. However, only 8% of customers said that they were delivered excellent customer service.

So allow yourself or your team a little leeway when responding to complaints. As I mentioned above, in any business, customer complaints are inevitable. After receiving a customer complaint and solving the problem in order to retain that customer, an organization must use this five-step process for handling customer complaints. Improve your support team satisfaction to improve your customer satisfaction and experience. Explore our customer satisfaction survey templates to rapidly collect data, identify pain points, and improve your customer experience.

• This allows you to meet your customers where they are and deliver personalized customer service, no matter the software.
• This service is key to keeping customers happy and solving any issues with the product or service.
• Tools like Help Scout’s saved replies can help agents respond to routine requests quickly.
• You can use NPS® surveys to measure customer satisfaction and learn how you can enhance your product’s features.

They lighten the load on contact center staff and save customers from waiting on hold. But overwhelmingly, customer feedback tells us that when it really matters most, only a human conversation will do. Use automation and chatbots selectively, and always provide clear signposting for how a customer can bail out of an automated interaction and connect with a human agent. Make sure your staff understands how valuable their role is and how seriously you take their contribution and customer service skills. Set standards for what is expected and be clear about why it matters that staff are – for example – always courteous, punctual, positive, and supportive of other team members.

Using these insights, businesses can make the necessary changes to improve their service offering. Depending on your niche, AI can do everything from ensuring vehicle safety through predictive maintenance to creating software that automatically adapts to the needs of the user. An uptick in brand loyalty, something that makes the $323 billion spent yearly on loyalty management worth it.

As one of the world’s most widely used money transfer service providers, Western Union is relied upon by millions of people to send money to friends and family wherever they are in the world. That’s an important service, and the company’s customers depend on it to work perfectly every time. Remember, the motive of creating an FAQ section is not to replace customer support altogether; it is to help make things easier for both your customer support team and the customer itself.

For example, it is entirely feasible that the choice of existing studies or the assessment will be influenced by the assumptions of the researcher without a protocol [39]. Additionally, the establishment of a standardized protocol that others can use to replicate the study adds credibility to the review. Whatever you do, you must ensure that your staff don’t lose their temper and snap back at customers who complain.

For example, your service suddenly stopped working when they were having a hectic day. They are mad at the company and the product but not at you, so letting the abuse get to you will only make you more stressed. When dealing with a complaining customer you have to keep a cool head, which can be tough to do. Tough because when a customer is yelling or throwing insults at you, you might want to respond in the same way – but that’s the worst thing you can do. Getting upset, arguing, or yelling at the caller will only escalate the situation, which can quickly get out of your control. Instead, take a few deep breaths and remind yourself that the customer’s anger isn’t directed at you.

💬 Chat conversations

It’s these teams that have to bear the brunt of customer frustration and anger in such difficult times. Time and again, your customer support team will encounter issues that are complex in nature and those they may not have ideal solutions for. They may respond https://chat.openai.com/ to such queries and problems by redirecting customers to other departments. Effective communication (including effective listening),as mentioned earlier, is crucial in helping your customer service team solve customers’ issues to their satisfaction.

Offering multilingual support and providing cultural sensitivity training are effective strategies. While translation tools are helpful, relying solely on them can be ineffective. Email support is valuable for multiple reasons, including convenience, privacy, and efficiency, impacting the Customer Lifetime Value (CMV) among all other types of customer service. Excellent service not only boosts overall satisfaction but also opens doors to upselling and cross-selling, potentially increasing your revenue. Furthermore, loyal customers generally contribute to a higher lifetime value, supporting long-term profitability.

Good customer service can increase loyalty and give brands a competitive advantage. The onboarding completion rate signifies how many customers successfully complete the initial setup or training process for a product or service. A high rate demonstrates effective onboarding, ensuring customers can maximize the value of what they’ve acquired. Requesting coaching and feedback from experienced mentors or colleagues is essential for skills development, as actively incorporating their input into your work will help you grow.

Here’s how it looks, for example, when an ALOHAS customer wants to find out more about the brand’s shipping policy. This step involved performing searches against the selected database searches to find the appropriate articles for this study, using the inclusion or exclusion criteria as the basis for these queries. Quality assessment standards were used to double-check identified primary studies, and details about each item that met the criteria were compiled. The primary focus of the planning phase is the preparation of the research undertaking to be carried out in order to perform the SLR.

This also includes a willingness to learn, as providing good customer service is a continuous learning process. Wondering how to overcome common complaints regarding customer service at your company? Let us show you how our conversational AI chatbot and cloud contact center can help.

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. Perhaps the most important element of exceptional customer service is being able to anticipate customers’ needs. When customer service agents approach clients, they must do so with a view to solving their problems — especially the ones customers aren’t yet aware of. When a customer reports a technical issue, the customer support team has a two-fold responsibility. Firstly, they must effectively communicate with the customer and note all the essential details pertaining to the problem.

If your team feels that it’s respected, valued, and supported, your customers will be the ones who see the benefit – and this can only have positive effects for your business’s reputation. Mailchimp is a popular email marketing/email marketing automation platform, used by millions of small and medium businesses around the world. As with many technology brands, the company has Chat GPT to handle a lot of tech-support queries through its social channels, as well as the regular complaints and queries that most B2C brands will be familiar with. Coca-Cola rises to this challenge admirably, effectively responding to all queries across its broad range of international social media channels, showing customers that it cares about their problems and concerns.

Lost or late orders are a frequent ecommerce customer complaint, especially on urgent or time-sensitive orders. Survicate allows you to create a multitude of surveys to gather feedback from your customers. Often, they just want to be heard, so let them know that what they have to say matters to you.

Key touchpoints involve how customers come into contact with your brand before, during, and after the purchase phase. So, it’s crucial to consider all these steps when engaging with a customer who might have had a positive or negative experience. For example, you don’t want your customer to think they’re getting 50% off when they’re getting 50% more product. Use authentically positive language, stay cheerful no matter what, and never end a conversation without confirming the customer is satisfied. For example, they may have preconceived notions when they hear an accent, see how a customer’s name is spelled, or see their address.

While the caller might be satisfied with the outcome for a while, you can either expect a second angry call when they realize you didn’t keep the promise, or they’ll just move to a different company. Instead, tell them what the current situation is and what options you have to help the customer. If at the moment you can’t help, tell them you will call back as soon as you have a solution to their issue. The faster you can find a solution that makes everyone happy (especially your customer), the more satisfied the customer will be and the quicker you will be able to end the call and sigh with relief. However, you might fall into a trap when trying to solve an issue quickly. You should not promise the caller something that you are not sure you will be able to deliver, or give them dates by which their solution will be fixed even though you know it’s unrealistic.

Whether a long line for a checkout counter or a return desk, lines disturb customer flow and make it likely that an operation alienates its customers. There are alternative options that can eliminate the need for lines altogether or make them less of an arduous experience. Dive into hands-on learning experiences through workshops on IT infrastructure management or seminars dedicated to emerging customer service trends.These sessions foster a deeper understanding of complex tech solutions. Attending a cybersecurity workshop, for example, allows you to explore the intricacies of digital security and apply this knowledge to support your product users effectively. As we journey through this dynamic landscape, it is essential to analyze the role of customer support. Tech companies, irrespective of their size, must adapt to the new expectations and leverage technology to provide a seamless self-service experience while retaining the human touch when required.

As your business grows, you’re bound to deal with customer complaints at some point or another. When customers make these types of requests, it shows they’re invested in your company and engaged with what you’re doing, so it’s good to show gratitude. The biggest bucket of complaints you’ll get are ones tied directly to your products and services. These requests could be about things like a product lacking a certain function, feature or service requests, bug reports, and other things in that realm. The best thing you can do for a dissatisfied customer is acknowledge their frustration and validate their feelings.

From the time a customer complaint is first submitted to the moment it gets resolved, record your interactions with the customer. Recording customer interactions can provide you with information that helps improve your products, services, and overall customer experience. However, customer complaints don’t have to be devastating for your business. In fact, a customer complaint can provide an opportunity for you to showcase great customer service and win over a dissatisfied customer. Being able to handle customer complaints effectively is essential if you want to maximize customer retention, maintain a good relationship with your target audience, and bolster your brand’s reputation. As we move towards an omnichannel shopping future, an app like QLess that can distribute mass messages to people in lines or checked into stores can help with this.

Your customers are no different, and to make them contact you more than once for a simple request may result in complaints about long resolution time and low efficiency. To prevent this kind of customer service complaint from appearing, always be hands-on about the deliveries. Write to customers as soon as you know that they will receive the package later than planned. This is especially true for retail customer service, where a customer wants a product or service delivered to them as soon as possible. Customers don’t want to wait hours on the phone or stare at their desktops forever. McKinsey’s research has shown that as many as 75% of online customers expect help within 5 minutes (!) of making contact online.

If your reps are constantly providing updates, customers will wait longer for solutions. In some cases, the product isn’t broken, rather, the customer doesn’t understand how to use it. Other times, customers aren’t a good fit for your product or service, but they blame your company for failing to fulfill their needs. No matter how customers arrive at this conclusion, your team needs to know how to prevent them from turning to your competitors. The statutory authority may require companies to reply to complaints within set time limits, publish written procedures for handling customer dissatisfaction, and provide information about arbitration schemes. Organizations often measure their customers’ experiences to assess the emotional, physical, and other connections customers have with a brand.

Recent developments in the field of NLP have been ushered in by the introduction of pre-trained models. Pre-trained models are ML models that have been trained on a large dataset of text, allowing them to understand the context of the text and handle various languages and dialects. They enhance model performance and save both time and resources compared to training models from scratch. NER is an NLP technique that can be used for automating responses to customer queries. This entails locating and extracting specific entities such as persons, organizations, places, and dates from a text. NER techniques have the ability to extract vital information from customer queries, such as product names, account numbers, and contact information, for use in customer service and support.

You can always move to email or phone if the customer requests it or if the problem you’re trying to solve is better suited to one of those channels. Let’s get started with why it’s important for businesses to offer SMS customer service. That’s why customer service messaging is one of many recent customer service trends shaking up how ecommerce and D2C businesses offer support. And the result is a stronger and faster customer experience for your website visitors, which can increase your conversion rate by as much as 12%. As we discussed earlier, a human touch is critical for many customers, and speaking with an automated chatbot can be a turn-off.

Here are some tips for making sure customer service is both thorough and well received. Depending on your market, you may need to assist customers with different native languages. Multilingual agents can overcome this barrier, but they may be hard to find. Consider using an intelligent, multi-language platform to help fill this gap. Customers should be able to easily navigate your website, particularly to find self-service tools like your knowledge base or customer portal.

When working with human customer support agents, this high degree of consistency can be a little more difficult to achieve. They can be programmed to systematically follow templates or scripts to provide a consistent customer service experience. Chatbots and live chat applications have unique advantages when it comes to delivering consistent and accurate responses to customer queries. One of the biggest advantages of chatbot solutions is the fact that they allow for immediate responses to customer inquiries. Live chat solutions can also help companies reduce their wait times, though not to the same degree.

If the product begins to underperform, the organization can initiate a customer service engagement before the customer knows there’s a problem. This real-time product performance monitoring, as well as product quality assurance and the ability of customers to manage their products using a mobile app, are just a few of the customer service advantages of IoT. It is an established truth that companies capable of maintaining customer loyalty and fostering brand allegiance thrive, whereas those unable to do so face significant challenges. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. The biggest thing that defines loyalty is the customer experience, if the people who frequent your business enjoy their experience, they will likely return.

Dealing with customer’s complaints is one of the toughest but also most important tasks of a support agent, so it’s crucial to learn how you can deal with an angry or complaining caller without losing your cool. Here are our 8 tips on how to treat such callers calmly and professionally. You can compare rates and delivery times for all your carriers in one place to get the fastest, most cost-effective shipping for your customers. The app automates almost every facet of your shipping process, and offers intuitive dashboards and seamless interfaces for an optimal workflow. Well, in case customers end up bypassing your self-service order tracking information and ask your support team about the status of their order.

A powerful customer service team is the building block of a successful order management system. Helpdesks like Gorgias help centralize the communication of tracking requests via apps into one place. From there, customer service teams can respond/automate responses related to tracking and order statuses.

At the end of the day, the only way we can truly improve the customer experience, AI solutions must improve providing services both from the agent-facing and customer-facing standpoints. Analyzing data to provide accurate predictions is arguably the primary use of artificial intelligence. In terms of customer service, this technology drastically improves on traditional methods such as obtaining customer feedback through online surveys, for example. 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.

Staff are vital to the shopping experience and can define a great time in-store or a difficult one. Data from QLess or other retail scheduling software options can help businesses with both hiring and training to ensure staff offer customers the best assistance possible. AI chatbots make it possible to provide support to customers at all times and in multiple languages. Virtual customer service agents can comprehend customer queries and provide relevant, logical answers to help them with their problems. This can range from providing information regarding a technical issue or even helping someone complete a transaction. In recent years, NLP techniques have been identified as a promising tool to manipulate and interpret complex customer inquiries.

According to the 2023 Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study organizations achieved cost savings of USD 6 per contained conversation with watsonx Assistant. The old saying “kill them with kindness” could not be more true in a situation with a customer complaining. But rather than smile and pretend to care, genuinely let them know you are thankful they are sharing with you their complaint or concern. For example, you can tell them right off the bat that you appreciate them taking the time to talk to you about their concern and you want to make sure you understand exactly what they are saying.

However, a simple follow-up email can show your customers that you are thinking about them and want to check if they have any additional questions or concerns. In such an email, you should thank the customer for their feedback, summarise their initial problem and how it was resolved, and ask if they have any other questions or issues with which you can help. Asking detailed questions about the customer’s current need will also help you fix the matter on the first call and thus improve customer satisfaction. As any call center agent will tell you, dealing with impatient or rude callers is one of the most challenging aspects of working in a call center – especially since agents answer calls like that almost every single day. It’s made even harder by agents having to respond to such calls with professionality, confidence, and calmness. Here are our eight tips on how to deal with customer’s complaints without ruining your own nerves.

In response, businesses are developing knowledge bases where they publish articles and videos that explain how to use products and services so customers can seek out touchless customer service whenever they need it. When a customer has a question, your customer service reps need to have the answer. Knowing how to use your product or service will help your reps empathize with your customers and be able to fix any issues that arise. Beyond adding incremental revenue, customer service can support your business strategy. Consider inviting your service team to present customer feedback at company meetings. Eighty percent of shoppers will abandon a retailer after three bad experiences, for example.

This may include steps such as greeting the customer, verifying their identity, confirming their issue, providing a solution, checking their satisfaction, and closing the interaction. You may also need to follow specific guidelines for different types of inquiries, such as refunds, complaints, or feedback. Make sure you understand and comply with these process and protocol, and document your actions and outcomes in a clear and accurate manner. Customer surveys are the most simple yet often the most effective way of understanding and what customers like and what they don’t.

This service is key to keeping customers happy and solving any issues with the product or service. Good customer service leads to satisfied customers and can help a business grow by building a loyal customer base. Customer service is the help and support a company offers customers at every stage of buying and using its products or services.

Fortunately, there’s a wide variety of customer service software on the market today that can take a lot of the heavy lifting out of your workflows. Once you’ve determined what your average first response time is, you can then set goals for improvement and continue to measure your progress. Gorgias provides you with many analytic tools that allow you to track key customer service metrics, including average response time. By leveraging tools such as these, you can easily analyze your customer support team’s efforts and set achievable benchmarks for more improvement.

With a dedicated customer service department, organizations could keep up with the latest customer service technologies and strategies, such as providing consistent training for all employees who interacted with customers. Before the telephone came into widespread use, customer service was largely provided in person or through the mail. The invention of the telephone gave organizations a new opportunity to stand out from the competition by providing better, faster customer service over the phone. Learn how to file complaints about products, services, online purchases, and telemarketers. For instance, a SaaS company notices a decline in renewals among customers who face difficulties with product integration. This indicates a need for improved onboarding processes and targeted support to address these challenges and reduce churn.

As you consider the available options, make sure the one you choose offers the features you need. This tactic can buy your team time to finish up a previous interaction or send an email, yet it shows you’re on top of the interaction and will be back soon. Response rate is always an issue customer queries with email surveys, and other channels see higher response rates. Using a multichannel approach will supply you with more responses and help you make more data-driven decisions with the results. On platforms like WhatsApp Business, you don’t have to wait around to hear from customers.

If you can’t solve a customer’s problem immediately, acknowledge that and let them know you’ll be right with them  to work toward solving their problem shortly. But a smart company will constantly be asking, “What is good customer service? ” The short answer is that it means carefully listening and attending to your customers’ needs. If you are not constantly on the lookout for opportunities to improve your customer service, your relationships will suffer. Proper training can be a significant cost center for companies, particularly when call center employees have a high turnover rate. According to Harvard Business Review, call center turnover can be as high as 45% and double or more than the rate in other positions in a company.

The process of listening to customer feedback and customer service reps’ feedback is important but more vital is taking action. Demonstrating to your customers – and your customer service professionals – that their feedback has value and that you are listening to them will help you to deliver good customer service (or even great customer service!). It’ll help to improve customer loyalty, but also help you to foster stronger relationships with your team as well. Since partnering with Zendesk, Liberty has delivered good customer service in every interaction. It offers customer support through phone, chat, email, and WhatsApp to meet customers on their preferred channels.

Customer success managers work with customers on strategy and goal-setting, compared to customer service representatives responding to individual problems and troubleshooting. Eighty-five percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. It doesn’t matter whether the customer is on self-service channels or chatting with a sales rep. Customers want continuity — not redirects to a different team or having to repeat information. When a visitor fills out a form asking for information, this customer service email template satisfies their need for a quick response — even if you require more time to offer a more detailed answer.

And with the help of AI, you can meet customer expectations and offer personalized service whenever possible. This can include AI arming your support reps with key customer details to better tailor requests or an AI agent offering relevant product suggestions based on a customer’s past purchase in a support conversation. Our CX Trends Report 2024 revealed that 70 percent of CX leaders believe bots are becoming skilled architects of highly personalized customer journeys. Organizations need to embrace customer orientation to elevate their customer service.

Brushing off a customer complaint or failing to fully understand the problem can make the situation worse. So train the customer service reps at your company in active listening techniques that allow customers to feel heard and seen by your organization. Maybe your service team noticed an influx of customers calling for information that could be better communicated with a self-serve FAQ page or similar option.

Even better are real-time alerts and SMS or email notifications at each point in an order’s journey from purchase to doorstep. As we mentioned earlier, SMS marketing lets brands connect with consumers in a personalized and measurable way, just like with customer service. According to Attentive, average read rates of 97% within 15 minutes make SMS a prime channel for connecting with prospects and customers.

With Gorgias Automate, you can improve your live chat widget with a self-service flows that let your customers track and manage their orders without any agent interaction. Customers can type in their question or comments and the chatbot will pull up your content that matches those keywords. Having your customer service team type out a custom response to every new email they receive from a customer is inefficient. In addition to using an auto-responder to send out an automated first response, one simple way to speed up your reply time is to make use of scripts and email templates.

Many organizations provide customer service primarily through phone interactions. Customers call a hotline, enter a queue, and a customer service representative picks up the phone. More than 50% of customers use the phone to contact customer support, making it the most-used channel for customer service.