How to Reduce Customer Complaints & Delight Customers in 2024

Customer service professionals across industries face a common question – How to reduce customer complaints?

Hearing back from your customers is amazing. However, the reason matters. Are you getting more complaints than compliments?

No matter how big your brand is, reading those long complaints is never easy. But If you want to survive in this fierce business world, running away from problems should never be an option. You must take responsibility, accept mistakes, and look for ways to reduce customer complaints proactively.

In this blog, we will explore common examples of customer problems, their solutions, and top tips to reduce complaints for happier customers and a thriving business.

What Are Customer Complaints?

A customer complaint refers to a formal communication of disappointment, problem, or negative feedback shared with a business. Complaints result due to the gaps between what a business promises to deliver and what the customers actually get.

Most businesses use a ticketing system to track complaints centrally. You can watch this short video to learn how to create and use a ticketing system for your customer support team.

Customer complaints can take many forms. They could arise due to delayed support, impolite employees, faulty products/services, internal processes, or improper communication. For example, customers can share their complaints when your product does not reach them on time or when they call your business, but nobody responds.

5 Common Complaints of Customers With Expert Solutions

Here are five common customer complaints, along with expert solutions to resolve them swiftly and efficiently.

1. Long Wait Times

Complaint:

Customers often express frustration when they have to wait for extended periods before receiving a response from customer service. This could be during phone calls, live chat sessions, or even email responses.

Long wait times can make customers feel neglected and unimportant, leading to dissatisfaction and negative reviews. In an age where instant gratification is expected, waiting too long for help can be a major deterrent.

Solutions:

• Implement AI Chatbots: Use AI chatbots to handle common inquiries and provide instant responses, reducing wait times for customers.
• Optimize Staffing: Analyze peak times and ensure adequate staffing during these periods.
• Offer Callbacks: Customers should be able to request a callback (at a preferred time slot) instead of waiting on hold.

Read More: How to Reduce Customer Service Response Time

2. Unresolved Issues

Complaint:

Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than reaching out for help and not getting their problem resolved. This can happen due to miscommunication, lack of knowledge, or insufficient resources.

Customers may also experience the frustration of having to explain their issue multiple times to different agents, which can make the process feel endless and inefficient.

Solutions:

• Train Agents Thoroughly: Ensure that customer service representatives are well-trained and equipped to handle a wide range of issues.

• Empower Agents: Give agents the authority to make decisions and resolve issues on the spot without needing to escalate to higher management.

• Track Overdue Tickets: Implement a system to track and follow up on overdue tickets to ensure no issues fall through the cracks and all customer problems are addressed promptly.

3. Pricing Concerns

Complaint:

Customers often feel that products or services are overpriced or do not offer good value for their money. This can lead to dissatisfaction, negative reviews, and lost sales.

Pricing concerns may stem from a lack of understanding of the product’s value, comparison with competitors, or unexpected additional costs.

Solutions:

• Conduct Market Research: Ensure competitive pricing by researching market trends and competitor pricing.

• Communicate Value and Benefits: Clearly explain the value and benefits of the product to justify the price.

• Offer Tiered Pricing Options: Provide tiered pricing options or bundles to cater to different budget levels.

• Implement Loyalty Programs: Offer discounts or loyalty programs for repeat customers to enhance perceived value.

Read More: Creating Unbreakable Bonds: 8 Tips to Build Customer Loyalty

4. Rude or Unhelpful Staff

Complaint:

Customers often encounter representatives who seem indifferent or rude, which can significantly impact their overall experience. Around 62% of customers feel that service insight and knowledge are key to a good experience.

Rude or unhelpful staff can make customers feel disrespected and undervalued. This negative interaction can lead to customers leaving your business for competitors and sharing their poor experiences with others.

Solutions:

• Customer Service Training: Provide regular training sessions focused on soft skills, empathy, and effective communication.

• Monitor Interactions: Use call monitoring and feedback mechanisms to assess and improve agent performance.

• Recognize and Reward: Encourage a positive workplace culture by recognizing and rewarding agents who provide excellent customer service.

Read More: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Service Training & Onboarding

5. Lack of Communication

Complaint:

Customers frequently complain about feeling uninformed or kept in the dark about order status, product information, or issue resolution.

Poor communication can lead to confusion, frustration, and a lack of trust in the company. Proper customer communication management can help you share timely and clear updates, making customers feel assured that their concerns are being addressed.

Solutions:

• Proactive Communication: Regularly update customers throughout the customer journey, from order confirmation to delivery.

• Multiple Channels: Use various communication channels (email, SMS, app notifications) to keep customers informed.

• Follow-Up: Regularly follow up with customers to ensure their issues are resolved and to maintain satisfaction.

8 Expert Tips to Reduce Customer Complaints

Dealing with customer complaints is an inevitable part of running a business, but addressing them effectively can turn dissatisfied customers into loyal advocates. Here are 8 tips for minimizing complaints.

1. Set Clear Expectations from the Get-Go

Setting clear expectations is one of the best tips for avoiding customer complaints.

To start a customer relationship on the right foot, you need to clearly communicate aspects such as product quality, pricing, return policies, and any hidden terms and conditions.

Rather than assuming that your communication is effective, ask questions to establish a clear understanding. “We hope you know that extra delivery charges will apply to your location. Do you have any further questions?” This is a great way to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Here are some business aspects that demand more clarity than others:

• Product/Service Quality: Set clear expectations about the quality of products or services your customers can expect from your brand. Do not boast of a feature that you do not even offer. More importantly, for low-priced products/services, communicate any serious limitations or drawbacks.

• Return & Refund Policies: Many customers complain that they cannot easily return their purchased items. Even if they return it, they are not eligible for a complete refund. You must create well-structured return and refund policies to avoid such complications and ensure a better shopping experience.

• Customer Service SLAs: So what happens when things go wrong? How long are customers expected to wait to get an email or phone response from your team? Communicate customer service SLAs and track how successfully your team lives up to service expectations.

Read More: 20 Best Customer Service Tips for Small Business

2. Track & Resolve Complaints With Customer Service Software

Do you use spreadsheets or email to handle customer problems? You might want to rethink your strategy.

If you do not have a centralized system to manage customer complaints, it can lead to inefficiencies and inconsistencies in issue resolution. Important complaints might get lost or overlooked, causing customer dissatisfaction and potential loss of business.

With the best customer support software, you can track the complete lifecycle of a complaint ticket. You have complete visibility from the moment a complaint is registered to the time it is resolved and marked as closed.

But. that’s not all. Some AI-powered customer service tools can even summarize a long complaint and offer automated response suggestions that you can use right away.

Real-time tracking of customer issues and requests will allow you to have complete control over your support operations, team productivity, as well as performance.

3. Train Employees on Soft Skills

You must have heard a lot of customers say, “I did not have a great experience with company XYZ. The representative was rude, uninterested, and just wanted to make a sale.”

Yes, we all have encountered such horrific experiences at some point in time.

When your customer-facing team is empathetic and professional, it builds a better reputation for your brand. On the contrary, a lack of soft skills can leave a bad impression on customers.

Here are some soft skills you can prioritize for your team:

• Empathy: Empathy is a must-have soft skill that reflects your ability to understand and relate to the feelings of others. Even if you don’t have a ready solution to a problem, showing empathy makes customers feel that their concerns matter.

• Patience: Frequent customer complaints can make anyone lose their patience and lead to further escalations. However, you need to realize that patience is a vital quality in the workplace that holds the power to reduce conflicts. Patient employees can understand customer problems, avoid arguments, and enhance the quality of relationships.

• Openness to Criticism: Employees must learn to take criticism from both internal leaders and external customers. Train them to see the positive side of every situation and handle negative feedback without taking it personally.

Read More: Top 17 Customer Service Skills to Delight Customers in 2024

4. Don’t Make Promises You Can’t Keep

Broken promises are the leading cause of customer complaints.

Remember the time when a business promised you next-day delivery, but your product never arrived in time? Making false promises to customers will not only hamper your brand’s image but can also land you in legal trouble.

Brands make all sorts of promises – “We have the best pricing,” “Join today and get 50% discount,” “Free shipping on all orders,” etc. But how many are able to fulfill them? To avoid customer complaints, you should never overpromise and underdeliver.

So does this mean that you should not promise at all? Of course not. You can always make promises that you can deliver. The focus should be on creating value rather than attracting customers with unrealistic promises.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

What promises are we making to our customers?

Make sure you know what exact promises you have made to customers. Revisit your SLAs, marketing emails, product catalogs, quotations, etc., and check whether you are in a position to fulfill them. Remove any vague promises and communicate the same to your team.

Which promises do our customers care about the most?

Are you making promises that your customers don’t even want? Spend some time figuring out what customers expect from your brand and what extra commitments they want you to make.

5. Create a Knowledge Base & Community Forum

Encouraging self-service is one of the best strategies for avoiding complaints from customers.

Picture this for a moment: a customer complains when he encounters a problem. What if the solution to the problem was readily available online, and there was no need to raise a complaint?

Invest your time and efforts in creating a dedicated knowledge base that is easy to search and holds answers to frequently asked questions. Similarly, create an online forum where customers can interact with each other and share their experiences, problems, or solutions.

How can you use your knowledge base to reduce complaints?

Most customers look for answers online before approaching your team. If you create an SEO-friendly help center, you can help customers find the right answers easily. For a delightful search experience, optimize your pages for multiple devices, such as mobile, tablet, PC, and laptop.

How can community forums help you avoid customer complaints?

A well-curated online community forum can help you drive customer engagement and build long-term trust with your audience. Before raising a complaint, customers can go through product release news, updates, expert suggestions, etc., and get their queries resolved by themselves.

6. Get to the Root Cause of Issues

So you successfully handled a customer complaint once. Great. But is that enough?

To reduce customer complaints and avoid similar problems in the future, you need to get to the root cause of an issue. Identify “complaint trends” and look for ways to find a permanent fix.

When an old bucket leaks, you can fix it once or twice, but after some time, you need a permanent solution. Similarly, you need to track the root cause of the problem and address areas that are resulting in customer dissatisfaction.

Imagine you receive multiple customer complaints about a product feature that does not work. Instead of fixing the problem for a couple of customers, share the concern with your product team and ask them to improve it.

Communicate this with your customers proactively. Tell them that your team is working on fixing the problem and share a realistic deadline for it. This simple process will help you create a delightful customer experience.

7. Take Feedback Proactively

To identify and reduce customer complaint barriers, you need to get proactive with your feedback process.

Proactive feedback will help you identify problems before they take an ugly turn. It is a bit like giving your car in for a service well in time rather than waiting for it to break down on the highway.

A lot of businesses share a survey with customers only once their problem has been fixed. Such surveys will help you get good ratings but will never display the complete picture. To offer a better experience, you need to share surveys every now and then to understand customer pain points.

For example, you can share open-ended questions, giving customers the opportunity to express themselves. Here are some examples:

• What can we do to improve our customer service?
• Is there any way we can improve the overall buying experience?
• How successful were we in meeting your quality expectations?
• Did you find all the important information on the website?
• What challenges did you face while shopping from our online store?

Regularly monitoring the responses to these questions will help your brand fix common problems and avoid customer complaints in the future.

Read More: 10 Important Customer Satisfaction Metrics to Target in 2024

8. Turn Complaints into Valuable Lessons

Most entrepreneurs see customer complaints as roadblocks to business growth. However, if you look closely, new learning opportunities can stem from negative feedback.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

— Bill Gates 

Here are some actions you can take for improved complaint management:

• Share complaints with other departments: Received a complaint about incorrect billing? Share it with your accounts and billing department. Received a complaint about delayed delivery? Share it with your logistics team or the courier partner. Create a transparent process and hold teams accountable for specific complaints.

• Monitor Conversations: Monitor every single conversation your team has with customers over the phone, live chat, or email. See what is working well and what can infuriate customers. Share examples of agents dealing successfully with customer complaints and set the right example for everyone.

• Offer Discounts: To turn any negative situation into a positive one, you can offer meaningful discounts to customers. Share a personalized apology email and attach some perks and discount coupons that can help you make up for the mistake.

Read More: 10 Templates to Write the Best Apology Emails to Customers

Reduce Complaints, Increase Customer Delight!

Complaints can grow exponentially if not handled in time. A customer shares a problem, your team is slow to respond, the customer shares on social media, and soon everyone has joined the ride—leading to a snowball effect.

To reduce customer complaints, you need to see every negative feedback as a learning opportunity. Set clear expectations with customers, train employees on soft skills, and avoid making promises that you can never fulfill.

Remember that mistakes do happen, and even big brands are not immune to them.

However, how you deal with them can make all the difference. If you are looking for a tool to automate complaint management, ProProfs Help Desk can be the ideal solution. You can track complaints from multiple channels, collaborate with departments, and leverage AI to speed up issue resolution.