7 Common Customer Complaints & How to Respond to them

Customers send a variety of messages daily. They are making enquiries, placing orders, giving feedback, providing recommendations, and dropping complaints. As you read this, there is a customer somewhere who is sending a complaint message to a business they are disgruntled with.

But as much as you may not like customer complaints, the complaint is much better for your business compared to them leaving without saying a word. Only 1 in 25 customers complain to a business after a bad experience. The majority who don’t complain simply leave. Or worse, they go on social media to rant about the issue.

Customer complaints are a good thing. It is the feedback that can be used to further improve the business. These complaints vary from business to business and industry to industry. However, there are some standard complaints you are bound to deal with irrespective of business type or industry. How do you respond to such complaints?

Perhaps you are a customer service representative, salesperson, or another role that requires you to interact with customers often. Here are 7 common customer service complaints you should expect to get often with a recommended way of responding to them. Note that your response would be in two ways:

1. The first is the response you send to the customer to resolve their complaint and compensate them when necessary.
2. Second is the feedback you take to the management to either improve the product or the arm of the business that the customer complaints fingered. This is especially important if the complaint is a recurring one.

So, here are 7 common customer service complaints and how you can respond to them:

1. Slow Response

We are in the age of instant gratification and customer expectations have gone through the roof. Fast response time is the most important factor in customer service. Customers expect an immediate response to their emails, SMSs, social media messages, etc. 

A major factor that causes customer service reps to respond slow is having to deal with bombarding messages from several channels, all at once. In the process, frustration and fatigue kick in, and messages are left unanswered.

Another major cause is the urge to resolve customer complaints before reaching out. Fight the urge! Continuous communication throughout the process is critical. Always remember that you are trying to resolve two problems – the actual issue, and the customer’s emotions. Leaving the customer hanging while you solve the first problem only aggravates the second problem.

Response

Even for complex customer complaints that will take more than four hours to resolve, send an acknowledgement email to show that you’re aware of the problem and are working on it.

One of the benefits of omnichannel customer service is that it facilitates quicker response speed. And it does this by bringing all customer communications into one robust platform, thereby easing the work of the customer service rep who gets to seamlessly interact with all customers. Also, customer chat history can easily be accessed and both complaints and enquiries are responded to swiftly.

Learn more about Omnichannel and its benefits

2. No Presence on the customer’s preferred communication channel

Some businesses don’t even have any presence on major channels. Similarly, some still don’t have a website; some do have a website, but it isn’t mobile-friendly; some aren’t on some social media, or don’t have someone monitoring messages from their social media pages. This results in customers sending messages with no one at the other end to respond to them.

As we mentioned in this piece on customer service trends, social media is now a crucial and widely accepted means of communication for most customers. As a result, when a customer sends a message via social media, “please send us an email” is not the kind of response they want to receive.

Response

Try to provide a convincing reason why your business has no social media presence yet. Follow this up with how you are working on fixing that soonest. You can then go on resolving their main issue in the most exciting way possible.

In the modern business world, social media is an important part of the equation. Potential customers often contact companies via social media and they expect a quick response. Hence, you should take that feedback to the management to make sure the company doesn’t just have a social media account, but an actual social media presence.

3. Irrelevant Copy & Paste Response

As our world becomes increasingly automated, customers increasingly seek real human interaction. Customers would frown at the messages that seem generic, especially when such messages don’t address their actual complaint or enquiry.

It’s understandable to have messaging templates saved that come as an automated response to frequently asked questions. You should have a dedicated page for FAQ on your website. Nevertheless, you don’t want to do this at the expense of the human touch.

Response

As with most customer complaints, empathise with them and apologize for the inconvenience. Of course, this cannot be another automated response, so make sure the customer knows that by introducing yourself and mentioning their name as well.

Ensure your knowledge base contains customer preferences, as well as relevant personal information. On their birthday, for instance, you can send a short “Happy Birthday” message with a coupon for discounts on their favourite products.

4. Constant Call Disconnection

Many factors can be responsible for this. Connectivity issues from you or the customer service provider, phone technical issues, etc. As far as customers are concerned, it’s a problem they don’t want to deal with.

Response

When a customer leaves this type of complaint, the ideal thing to do is to get their number and quickly return their call. Then try to work with the technical team to resolve whatever is responsible for such to avoid recurrence.

5. Delivery Issues/Delayed Delivery

Logistics is a major problem that most businesses that deal with tangible products have to confront. You could get everything right with product quality, but failure in fast delivery will leave customers frustrated and angry.

69% of customers are much less likely to patronize a retailer again if the item they ordered is not delivered within two days of the day promised. These customers that can wait for two days are even benevolent, some customers can’t stand waiting another minute after the promised day.

Response

For businesses that fall under this category (usually e-commerce), the best response is to fix your logistics. Get more dispatch riders or partner with a logistics company that has more than enough riders to go around. But you’re possibly not the business owner; logistics is probably not your department or within your control. So while the logistics issues are being resolved, try to convince customers that efforts are being made to ensure that their delivery gets to them as soon as possible.

Retain more customers, convert more leads with NotchCX. Learn more

6. Unable to Speak to a Human

This is usually frustrating for most people. You have probably personally experienced a situation where you needed to resolve an issue urgently. Talking to a customer service rep appeared to be the best way to go about this. You pick your phone to place the call and all you get to hear for the next 30 minutes or more is a pre-recorded message telling you to “press 1” or “press 2”, with no rep in sight. Annoying experience, you’d agree.

Self-service is great, no doubt. It’s one of the trends in customer service, as we captured here. However, it cannot fully take the place of having actual humans to talk to when customers need them.

Response

When a customer sends an email or a message complaining about this, the ideal thing to do is to empathize with them by understanding why they are frustrated.

Make sure to personalise the message by mentioning their name. Mention yours as well when you sign off, so they know it is not another auto-response. And if it’s in line with your company’s customer service strategy, provide a phone number for them to contact you directly if they would still like to have the conversation over a call.

Finally, take the feedback to the organization’s management and find a way to balance self-service with inputs from customer service reps.

7. Repeating Information

Ever been in that situation where you speak to a customer service agent, maybe over a phone call, then maybe you send a mail later only to be asked to go over the previous conversation again? Anyone who has experienced this knows how frustrating it can be.

Response

It’s already established that customers find this quite frustrating. Hence, the best way to respond to the customer is to apologize and try to make them believe such won’t happen again. And that takes us to the next step – get an Omnichannel CRM.

This is one of the problems the Omnichannel feature on NotchCX seeks to solve by bringing all customer communications to one place. This way previous conversations are saved under each customer ID and every customer service rep that interacts with a customer can read their chat or call history.

CONCLUSION

Customer complaints are valuable feedback that can help you grow and improve your business. In fact, they are insights and data that can be harnessed to help turn your business around positively.

Nevertheless, you still want to reduce the rate of complaints you get from customers because for every customer sending you a complaint, several others are leaving you for your competitors without a word.
Minimise customer complaints by providing fast, personalised customer service using NotchCX’s Omnichannel tool. Get started here.