10 Tips On How To Handle Customer Complaints 2024

Putting in a good plan with the right people, proper training, and appropriate channels can lead to more sales, customer loyalty, and referrals. Even though things may be moving in the right direction, corporations shouldn’t rest on their laurels. Keeping one step ahead of the game means continuing to find ways to improve and provide an even greater customer experience.

If a customer does report an issue with a rep, management should always investigate the issue. Managers should give their reps the benefit of the doubt but try to get every possible detail. Rather than criticizing the rep’s approach, look for opportunities to teach the agent about preventing these types of situations. If these issues continue to occur, it may be time to take more severe actions.

Overview of the tech customer service ecosystem

Communicate them effectively at the time of purchase so there’s no question later. If customers visit your website and look for support options, provide a self-service portal where they can find the answers to their questions independently. In the event that they can’t, your solution should route them directly to a specialist in customer support who has the subject-matter expertise to answer their questions. Of course, you’ll also want to keep an eye on your staffing ratios compared to your customer base.

Although all customer complaints are different and should be handled on an individual basis, there are a few best practices to keep in mind no matter what type of complaint comes your way. If the customer has an issue with your product or service, having to jump through hoops to get it resolved will only create more frustration. Next, we’ll cover some best practices your service reps https://chat.openai.com/ can use daily while interacting with customers to improve their experience. Did you roll out a new product feature that has a few bugs and is causing consistent complaints across the board? Maybe the details of the new feature were not communicated clearly to customers and are causing friction. Getting to the root of the issues will help you formulate a plan which we’ll cover next.

From addressing inquiries and solving problems to getting the desired results, it is about ensuring customer satisfaction and enhancing overall CX. Advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Emotion Recognition technologies are revolutionizing the capabilities of AI chatbots, bringing them closer than ever to human-like interactions. Ecommerce businesses stand to lose not only existing customers but also potential ones.

And customer service can take many forms — from troubleshooting a product installation to downloading software to processing a purchase return. The bottom line is that your company needs to be present across all these channels. You can do this by prioritizing omni-channel support – where all your support channels are seamlessly inter-connected. This will enhance communication between customers and agents and lead to faster, more accurate resolutions. When you trust and empower your customer service team to come up with resolutions, they will rise to the occasion.

According to Zendesk benchmark data, AI-driven insights and recommendations can accelerate customer resolutions by 300 percent. Apart from the indirect methods mentioned above, a more straightforward approach to gauging customer preferences and expectations is surveys. You can send out customer surveys at various touchpoints during a customers’ journey, including after onboarding, after every support interaction, after a purchase, etc. It’s no secret that giving your customers a great experience goes a long way in determining your company’s success, especially given the competitive nature of markets today.

• This staggering figure highlights the direct correlation between customer complaints, service quality, and the bottom line, emphasizing the necessity of an effective complaint resolution strategy.
• Businesses value customer service—employing NLP in customer service allows employees to concentrate on complex and nuanced activities that require human engagement.
• Time and again, your customer support team will encounter issues that are complex in nature and those they may not have ideal solutions for.
• This function ensures that all of the interactions customers have with your brand holistically contribute to their organization’s overall growth and success.

Don’t assume that you know what the customer wants or needs, and don’t dismiss them as trivial either. When frustrated, people can have difficulty expressing their concerns or what they need from you to make them happy. Often, you can resolve an issue just by listening to your customers and allowing them to vent. Doing this sends a clear message to the customer – we hear you, we value you, and we make use of the knowledge you provide. When your EX (employee experience) and CX (customer experience) goals align, you can begin to build a culture around a customer experience that has employees feeling fully engaged and committed to their work.

A lot of businesses, particularly small businesses, can benefit from developing a personal rapport with their present and prospective customers through social media channels. According to a report published on Statista, the global customer satisfaction rate with live chat stood at 83.04% in 2019. It gives customers the ability to instantly clarify their doubts and concerns regarding your products and services, making their purchase decisions easier and quicker. According to a research report by Hiver, more than 50% respondents think there’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than having to explain their issue over and over again to different customer support representatives. Not only does it waste the customer’s time, but it also ruins their experience. Customer service agents must maintain a record of important customer data, collating information via order forms, feedback forms, email inquiries, complaints, etc.

Communicating with clarity, concision, and confidence is one of the key ways you can instill trust and loyalty in your customers. Focussing on making customers happy is not the job of your customer service team alone, but your entire organization’s. Ensure that everyone in your company, every goal you set, and every decision you make, places the customer in the centre. Companies whose customer service representatives go that extra mile in assisting and surprising their customers with top-notch experiences are the ones that stand out. Such companies are perceived to be superior than their competitors in the industry, even if their products and services are similar in terms of quality and features.

And for bigger-picture learning and training, HubSpot Academy provides free certifications and training to learn about the inbound methodology and specific verticals within the software. Offering a multi-channel approach to customer service will help you provide excellent service to everyone, no matter their preferences. We’ve been talking a lot about how important good customer service is for your business, but what makes customer service good? We cover this in-depth in this blog post, but let’s dive into some of the most vital components below. According to Zendesk, 80% of companies plan to increase their current levels of investment in overall customer experience (CX), spending their money on things like automation capabilities, AI, and personalization. And happy customers will grow your business faster than sales and marketing.

Email support

In this article, we deep-dive into the fundamentals of handling customer complaints in a way that bolsters your brand reputation and helps you drive customer retention. Accept the feedback, learn from it, and make sure you do everything you can to solve the problem your customer is facing. Your customers want to feel like they have access to real people, not bots and FAQs.

If the above does happen to you, you can assure your customer that customer service reps are receiving training. Just because the internet has made it easier to provide customer service virtually doesn’t mean you should always interact via live chat or email. If you’re offering a service – such as web development, copywriting, or social media consultancy – it can pay to have a video call with your customers. The best way to understand if your customer service is top-notch is to ask your customers.

This statistic underscores the precarious nature of customer loyalty and the critical importance of addressing complaints swiftly and effectively. If customers have a positive experience with your company, they will share this experience with friends, family and connections – which in turn can lead to new business. Find out what the customer needs, then help them accomplish that with the chosen item or service.

After offering a resolution or identifying what you can – or cannot do – to accommodate any requests they may have or simply to respond to the complaint they stated, ask the customer if they have understood what you said. Make sure you do this in a non-demeaning way, but rather state your intent. Very simply, after all has been discussed, ask your customer if they have understood how you can help them or for that matter, how you are unable to do anything else to accommodate them.

The internet enables customers to share their feedback in multiple channels, including forums, comparison websites, social media networks and more. Without taking the necessary steps, these complaints can snowball, and even go viral. The key to overcoming these common issues is by creating a clear process and a coordinated response that addresses the customer’s complaints. Even if they do not complain directly to you, you can still find reviews and complaints online that you can address. Sometimes, if left alone, these complaints can snowball and turn into a much bigger issue, so it’s important to be proactive and address these as quickly as possible. More now than ever, thanks to the internet and social media, people are becoming increasingly vocal about their experiences with businesses – whether it’s good or bad.

Employing active listening and demonstrating empathy can ease tense situations and foster trust. While you decide which service channel to pick, understand what customer service is in simpler terms and prepare your strategy accordingly. A comprehensive understanding of technology, products, and tools, along with the ability to navigate and troubleshoot.

Perhaps the most important part of handling customer complaints is finding a resolution–and quickly. Keeping your team in the loop can enable you to resolve customer complaints more quickly. Additionally, communicating a customer queries customer complaint to your team can prevent the mistake or miscommunication that prompted the complaint from happening again. If you’re a customer-centric business, then customer complaints are practically inevitable.

If you notice that your brand currently sees lots of unresolved email threads or phone calls, you might need to offer customers a more convenient and flexible channel to talk to your team. For ecommerce brands that deliver physical products, conversational support is a no-brainer. Imagine your customers get shipping updates via SMS and can just respond to the message if the package isn’t delivered correctly to get immediate help.

Even if your business doesn’t make a mistake, one of your customers will eventually hit a roadblock that leads them to your customer service team. These are the situations where your service reps make or break the customer’s journey. Another significant reason to solve these issues is that we are emerging from a global event that transformed the economy and consumer habits. In 2020, a record 12,200 retail stores closed due to the pandemic, and e-commerce eating into brick and mortar.

Customer Service Operations

These applications enable users to make calls and perform voice-based online searches, receiving relevant information and results [87]. Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is a deep learning-based approach that uses neural networks to translate text. NMT models are trained on large amounts of bilingual data and can handle various languages and dialects, which is useful for customer service that requires multilingual support. Humans can speak naturally to their smartphones and other smart gadgets with a conversational interface in order to obtain information, use Web services, give instructions, and engage in general conversation [88,89,90]. The objective of this review was to find out how chatbots affect how loyal customers are to a business. The findings of this systematic review of the literature indicated that there is a correlation between customer experience and customer satisfaction when using a chatbot, leading to customer loyalty [27].

Calmly listen to what they are saying, then just as calmly reply and react to them with the following tips in mind… After you have listened to a caller’s reason for phoning, acknowledge their problem as being important to you. Don’t play down or dismiss their worries, as this way you are only going to make the customer feel ignored and make them even angrier.

The way you interact with customer complaints after their problem is resolved sets the stage for the rest of your business relationship. Positive customer service experiences have a measurable impact on spending. American Express research shows that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience. Empathy is the ability to understand how the customer is feeling and where they’re coming from.

Although meeting customer expectations is important for any brand, it’s a particularly important part of the job for customer service reps at an online company. Customer calls may be the only person-to-person interactions the company has with its customers. Therefore, it’s critical to have a team skilled enough to deliver excellent customer experiences and expertly address customer complaint resolution. An issue managed to the customer’s satisfaction can make the difference between customer retention and churn. Every customer relationship salvaged means continued revenues and growing customer lifetime value (CLTV), metrics that are vital to your business’s financial position.

Tools like community forums and a knowledge base can help customers find their own solutions and avoid service calls altogether. This creates a more enjoyable and convenient service experience for your customers. For a long-term solution, consider adopting customer feedback tools to survey customers about your product. You can use NPS® surveys to measure customer satisfaction and learn how you can enhance your product’s features. These feedback tools provide both quantitative and qualitative data that you can use to improve product development.

For example, The Ritz-Carlton Company gives employees the autonomy to spend up to $2,000 solving customer problems — without needing approval. And while that whopping amount might be over budget for your organization, the more significant reason why this company has created such a policy bears remembering for every customer service team. That means business leaders need to plan and invest accordingly if they want to see more revenue come from customer service.

That means you can potentially lose a third of your customer base just because you didn’t pick up the phone fast enough. Predict, improve, and augment the customer experience using automation and intelligence. In its best form, customer service is characterized by adopting a customer-first approach. Brands must go above and beyond to meet customers’ needs, anticipate their requirements, and engage them proactively.

Brand loyalty isn’t a given, it’s earned by companies that work hard to keep it. Customers appreciate support teams that consistently see their problems through to their resolution. By showing that you are dependable and set a high standard of service through a strong work ethic, you’re also proving to be the ideal brand ambassador.

Customer service is the support that organizations offer to customers before and after purchasing a product or service. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. In customer service, the organization’s representative values both potential and existing customers equally. Customer service representatives are the main line of contact between an organization and its customers, making CX a critical facet and the main priority of customer service teams. In terms of training customer service teams, successful companies often invest in comprehensive programs that focus on developing empathy, problem-solving skills, and product knowledge. Make sure your employees are well-acquainted with your products and services, as well as trained in customer service.

After preparing your teams to deliver good customer service, the next step is to set up your service channels. For example, Apple has created an ecosystem to make sure that their customers receive support and assistance on a platform they are comfortable with in-store, online, and in forums. In addition to creating user-friendly products, they go the extra mile to make their customers feel valued and comfortable. CX is proactive, aiming to create a seamless and delightful journey that exceeds customer expectations. AI can be used in a multitude of ways and one key use is improving the customer service offered by businesses. AI is effective at predicting the needs of the customer which allows organizations to make proactive changes to improve the service offered.

Sometimes people indeed complain just because they are having a bad day, but keep in mind that we all have bad days and you never know what is going on in that person’s life. Frequently, if a customer comes to you with a problem, it means that they want to be heard. Even if the complaint seems trivial to you, it clearly has some significance to them because they are taking their time to reach out to you.

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, so it’s crucial that they always feel valued, assisted, listened to, and confident when they interact with you. According to our CX Trends Report, 83 percent of CX leaders say data protection and cybersecurity are top priorities in their customer service strategies. Customer data privacy is a rising trend for this year and beyond, so you must prioritize security to ensure your private data stays private.

Customers hate repeating their problems to your reps. This happens when they’re either transferred to new reps or dealing with an agent who isn’t paying close attention. When customers have to describe their issue multiple times, it’s both a frustrating and time-consuming experience. Internet forums and the advent of social media have provided consumers with a new way to submit complaints. Publishing complaints on highly visible websites increases the likelihood that the general public will become aware of the consumer’s complaint. If, for example, a person with many “followers” or “friends” publishes a complaint on social media, it may go “viral”. Internet forums in general and on complaint websites have made it possible for individual consumers to hold large corporations accountable in a public forum.

Benefits of Effective Email Communication

At least 61% of the customers still prefer phone calls for final resolution. Globally, social media platforms have become very popular communication channels. Companies too are now using these platforms to the best of their capacities, be it for marketing or for customer support. Knowledge base or knowledge support videos demonstrate product features and/or common customer queries.

However, you should respect the fact that customers are taking time out of their own schedule to provide their views – even if those views are negative. Indeed, even negative feedback can be useful; it may be that it highlights a genuine problem. If negative feedback hits upon an issue that genuinely needs resolving, then you need to take the requisite action. Is it about individuals who go the extra mile, or is it about a culture that prioritizes the customer above all else?

Companies that invest time and effort in enhancing their customer service are better positioned to foster a customer-focused culture across the organization. A good customer support agent has a thorough understanding and technical know-how of the company’s product and service portfolio. The agent also possesses excellent listening and communication skills since support interactions with customers involve high levels of patience, coherence, and concision.

Encouraging brand loyalty and return customers is a vital goal for any business, and poor response times can make this goal all the more difficult to reach. No matter what product or service you happen to be selling, creating a positive customer experience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for long-term success. While there is a lot that goes into creating a great experience for your customers, prompt customer service goes a long way. For administrative purposes, chatbots have been used in education to automatically respond to questions from students in relation to the services the school system provides for the academics. NLP is useful for many businesses, however customer service benefits the most.

GrubHub uses SMS messaging to glean customer feedback on recent orders and its mobile app. This approach brings agents and skilled experts together to work through complex cases. As a bonus, junior employees and new hires gain new skills they otherwise would not have been exposed to. I am sorry to find out that you were unhappy with your experience with our company.

• Then make sure to follow up with them a few days later after you’ve resolved the problem.
• Customer support focuses on helping customers use a product or service effectively.This often involves technical knowledge and troubleshooting, addressing specific product-related issues.
• You can bring various customers together, including webinars, interactive websites, social media, trade shows, and conventions.
• Basically, it provides the necessary rigidness, while humans can intervene only at a later stage of the process.
• VR is a computer-generated experience, typically delivered over a headset, that creates an immersive environment.

The faster you find a reasonable solution that everyone can agree on, the happier your customer will be and you get to breathe a sigh of relief. Not only that, but getting upset, losing your cool, or yelling at a customer is never a good thing. You are more likely to make good progress and satisfy your customer’s needs if you approach the problem with a calm state of mind. This is especially important as post-call work contributes to agent burnout with one in five agents (20%) thinking about quitting every week, according to Qualtrics research.

We’re talking shout conversational intelligence, that – no matter the platform customers talk to or about you on – can clue you in on what they need and how they feel. If you’re working in a customer-facing service role and want to excel in your work, these are for you. According to a survey conducted by Hiver, 48% of Gen Z and 35% of Millennials prefer email as a channel, making it the most-used channel for support communications. This trend is followed by phone – 30% of Gen Z and 31% of millennials prefer using the phone after email as their preferred medium of communication. The term customer success first originated in the ’90s but has gained greater traction over the past decade, especially in the world of SaaS. This will help you to understand which platform your customers are using the most.

With these types of complaints, it’s good to offer solutions or workarounds when available. You could even point them in the direction of another provider if it’s simply something you don’t offer, which can help build credibility with the customer. Time-based complaints are essentially complaints based around something not happening in the timeframe the customer expects.

If you’re not the product manufacturer, then this may not be your fault, but the customer might blame you for it anyway. Or, due to misunderstanding how to use the product, they simply have a lack of knowledge. While it’s Chat GPT important to follow your company protocols and guidelines, it’s also important to be able to go the extra mile for your customers. Never offer a solution that you can’t follow through on, as that will only set you back.

This may seriously affect your business reputation, even if the customer simply misinterpreted the attitude of the agent due to their character differences. Tidio offers such functionality for all your communication channels, so your operators can always stay updated. The best solution would be to set up a full follow-up email sequence in your CRM, so the updates are sent out automatically and all customers are well-informed about the status of their purchase. Those, who are less patient, would probably turn into dissatisfied customers and write a complaint about the lack of follow-up. If the customer is waiting too long, their dissatisfaction grows even bigger.

In the years to come, we can anticipate that NLP technology will become increasingly sophisticated and precise [104, 121, 122]. In this section, we discuss the advantages of NLP applications in customer-focused industries. Review of the relevant literature shows that advances in AI have allowed for the creation of NLP technology that is accessible to humans.

For your sake and theirs, it can be helpful to adopt an approach that keeps you focused on the bigger picture and helps you stay resilient and determined to reach a good outcome. Make it your mission to find solutions and help your customers move from a problem-focused mindset to a more positive one. This approach is even more successful when the customer is in a good frame of mind, to begin with.

Brand equity allows you to sell products and services at a premium since you have already proven your business can meet customers’ needs successfully. Enhance your customer service by understanding how your customers are feeling about their experiences. Get started quickly with SurveyMonkey’s expert-written customer satisfaction templates and solutions.