Customer complaints are dissatisfied messages from customers when their expectations are not met regarding a company’s products, services, communication, marketing, or some combination of these.
To handle customer service complaints and give your customers a positive perception of your business or product, resolve their complaints as fast as possible.
Therefore, it is important to know how you can respond to your customers’ complaints to make them happy.
In this blog, we will discuss the common types of customer complaints, methods of handling them, and the benefits of addressing them.
Customer complaints refer to the negative feedback that customers give regarding a product, service, or experience they received from a company or brand. These complaints can be submitted through surveys, emails, social media reviews, community forums, or online review sites.
Customer complaints can arise from a variety of issues, such as product defects, bad customer service, billing errors, or any other aspect that does not align with the customer’s expectations.
Below are some typical customer complaints that you might come across in your daily interactions.
Having to remain on hold on phone calls for extended periods of time may not be practical for customers who are busy. When the wait for assistance exceeds expectations, it can result in dissatisfaction and complaints.
These complaints can also occur in situations involving late product shipments, delayed project deliverables, and other instances where timely service is expected but not delivered.
How to resolve and prevent this customer complaint
Complaints due to delivery problems are common in the e-commerce and logistics industries. Delivery issues can range from damaged goods to packages being lost or stolen. These issues can negatively impact customer satisfaction and the reputation of the business.
How to resolve and prevent these customer complaints
Miscommunication can occur for a variety of reasons, including language barriers, unclear instructions, technical problems, or simply a lack of clarity in the customer communication process.
Complaints due to miscommunication can lead to customer dissatisfaction, negative word-of-mouth, and even customer churn.
How to resolve and prevent this customer complaint
Quality complaints occur when a company’s offerings do not meet customer expectations. Such complaints can result from minor issues such as a delay in service or major concerns like a product defect or a breach of contract.
Handling these complaints effectively helps maintain customer loyalty and a positive brand perception.
How to resolve and prevent these customer complaints
Customer complaints about unsupportive agents typically revolve around issues such as lack of empathy, inadequate resolution to problems, rudeness, or insufficient knowledge about the product or service.
How to resolve and prevent this customer complaint
Inefficient communication systems often fail to retain or transfer key details across service interactions. Customers are then forced to repeatedly provide the same information whenever they are transferred to another agent.
How to resolve and prevent this customer complaint
These complaints arise when customers dispute charges on their bills, feel overcharged, are confused by the billing structure, or encounter errors in the billing process. These are usually caused by a lack of transparency, clerical mistakes, technical issues, or misunderstandings of the pricing model.
How to resolve and prevent this customer complaint
Customers sometimes express dissatisfaction when they are unable to find information to help them resolve issues independently. Younger customers, especially, prefer to find answers themselves rather than have to communicate with company representatives.
How to resolve and prevent this customer complain
Regardless of a business’s best efforts, its customers will have complaints at some point in the relationship.
Here are some methods on how to avoid customer complaints and handle them effectively:
The most important thing to do when you want to handle customer complaints is to listen to what your customer has to say. While listening, take notes to help you identify the problematic areas.
Though your customer may perceive their problem one way, your extensive knowledge of your company’s product (or whatever the complaint involves) may give you greater insight into the core problem.
When you listen to your customer, you are more likely to address the customer pain point solve the problem that is affecting the customer. If you do your job well, eventually, you get a happy customer.
Listening to your customers’ complaints is the time to learn all the important facts about the matter.
How do you do this effectively? You get permission from your customer to ask some questions. As you ask questions, you get to understand the context of the issue, giving you more detail than you had before.
Questioning helps you get to the root of the complaint. And with that, you figure out a way to resolve the issue as easily as possible.
A study by Forbes reports that 96% of customers are unlikely to return to a business that has disappointed them.
Therefore, whenever you get a complaint from a customer, you need to offer a sincere apology to win back customer trust.
Offering an apology expresses that you did not expect the problem to occur. It also shows that you care about the customer’s issue.
In your apology email, communicate that you are committed to setting things right as fast as possible.
Though some customers may react negatively regarding an issue, it is a good idea to authentically thank them for raising the matter with you.
Thanking your customer reveals that you are considering the complaint seriously.
Besides thanking them, ensure you recognize how significantly the problem may be affecting the customer. Doing this is simple: just ask how much harm has been done.
Your customer will view you as genuinely concerned.
Finally, after listening, asking questions, and acknowledging the issue, you should find a solution.
Providing a solution is the final step in handling a customer complaint. The solution should address the issue reasonably and result in a happy customer.
Customer complaints are useful to every business. This is because negative feedback helps the business improve on specific shortcomings the moment the issues are rectified.
BoldDesk is a customer support platform for addressing customer complaints in an effective manner.
The following are some of the ways BoldDesk helps handle your customer complaints:
BoldDesk provides a help desk ticketing system that converts all incoming support emails into tickets. Customers can respond to their tickets through email.
By managing customer data from a central location, your staff can access the most recent information. With this, you can eliminate the need to track multiple responses and threads.
You can also categorize tickets with tags and private notes based on customer requirements.
By applying advanced filter rules to tickets, you can organize the tickets as needed and assign them to the appropriate support agent.
Netomi reports that for 61% of consumers, an outstanding customer support experience involves a short time to resolution.
By using canned responses, you can send quick responses to common customer complaints without any mistakes.
Perfection in a reply is important because it increases customers’ confidence in your support team.
By eliminating chances for mistakes to be introduced, you can more accurately and effectively resolve customer complaints.
BoldDesk also lets you set priority levels for tickets so that critical issues can receive replies first.
A service-level agreement (SLA) sets response and resolution due dates based on business hours.
Most businesses have customers in various time zones. BoldDesk allows you to create business hours and holiday lists to fit your team’s schedule.
An SLA helps set ideal response times and send reminders about assigned issues and unsolved complaints via email.
Reminders help prevent customer complaints from remaining unassigned or unaddressed for a long time.
Sending a reminder allows agents to focus on resolving customer issues and speeds up the resolution process.
BoldDesk’s reporting and analytics dashboards make managing a support team easier. For instance, a ticket conversation report shows messages updated by customers and agents across all communication channels in one place.
By examining the agents’ responses to customers, you can identify agents who need more training and add a tag or private note inline for follow-up.
Accordingly, these reports help support managers in monitoring agent performance and identifying areas that need improving to handle customer complaints better.
Additionally, the customer satisfaction (CSAT) report provides CSAT scores, survey response rates, and customer feedback and ratings.
Using filters, you can categorize CSAT data by agent, category, contact, and contact group. This helps identify customers’ issues and agents that may need additional help.
BoldDesk auto-assignment rules direct incoming tickets to the appropriate agents in the organization based on ticket attributes.
Assigning tickets to the correct team based on the conditions configured avoids unnecessary redirecting between teams.
By eliminating manual effort at each step of the ticket life cycle, agents can focus on resolving customer issues.
Consequently, this helps support agents resolve issues on time and thereby reduces ticket resolution times.
Handling customer complaints is a primary function of a company’s support team, and handling them effectively can lead your company to growth. We build products that you can customize according to your present and future needs.
Without a doubt, BoldDesk can help you solve your customers’ complaints easily. Contact us to arrange a live demo to experience the enhanced capabilities BoldDesk can offer your support team. Or, sign up for a 15-day free trial with instant access today.
What strategies do you use to manage customer complaints?
Feel free to share in the comments section below.
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