Bad customer service can be defined as a company’s failure to meet customer expectations in terms of service quality, response time, or overall customer experience.
What is bad customer service?
Virtually no agent or call center wants to provide poor customer service, but according to playvox there are countless reasons why call centers and agents fail to provide a less than excellent customer experience.
Often times, lack of resources, tools, training, outdated technology, or a combination of these negatively impacts service delivery and ultimately affects customer satisfaction and retention.
A recent survey showed that Americans are more dissatisfied with the customer service they receive than ever before. According to a PWC U.S. Customer Experience Survey, even when people love a company or product, 59% of customers will walk away after several bad experiences, and 17% after just one bad experience.
Poor service negatively impacts businesses in several areas:
- Company and brand reputation.
- Customer churn or decreased customer loyalty.
- Unhappy customers telling friends, family and colleagues about their experiences.
- Costs associated with lost revenue, product returns, etc.
- Negative online reviews.
- Lower employee morale and higher dealer turnover.
7 Bad Customer Service Examples and How to Fix Them
lack of empathy
Customers expect a customer service representative to be there for them and apologize on behalf of your company when a product or service fails to meet their expectations. They want to hear the agent say they’re sorry, acknowledge the inconvenience that occurred, and explain in detail how to resolve the issue.
If a customer service rep is unable to empathize with them and is running the script without any emotional engagement, the customer may feel as though there is no acknowledgement of responsibility or genuine apology.
Understanding and caring for customer needs and frustrations is a component of the call center job, and agents must be able to demonstrate that they care about your customers’ needs and frustrations.
Failure to demonstrate empathy through tone, communication, and other means leads to customer frustration and, in the worst case, loss of customers.
Using the right tone and language is just one aspect of great customer service behavior. Your loyal customers also want to feel as if your agents have the solution to every problem, even if they don’t.
Customers who encounter agents who say they don’t know how to help them cannot inspire confidence and are likely to be disappointed with the overall service you provide.
How to fix this problem
While you can’t teach empathy, contact center leaders can take steps to instill a positive, “can-do” approach to customer experience.
When hiring agents, include interview questions that measure empathy and interpersonal skills, and be sure to set up metrics to measure how emotionally responsive and engaged your agents are.
Train agents to stay positive and handle issues using emotional intelligence to reduce the risk of customers ending their interactions with an unpleasant experience.
keep customers waiting
This is one of the most common examples of a bad customer service experience, the prospect of waiting in line for a phone or online response for minutes (or more) is enough to inspire a sense of dread in even the most optimistic customers.
A Zendesk survey found that nearly one in three customers expect to get a response in less than five minutes over the phone.
How to fix this problem
It is essential to reduce queue and response times as much as possible, but it is easier said than done when you have a limited number of customer support agents available. Once again, technology comes to the rescue.
AI-based solutions enable your contact center to automate workforce management (WFM) processes, ensuring the right agents are properly staffed across your omnichannel business, and you can measure changes in real-time to minimize impact on customer experience.
Difficulty accessing customer service or support
Do you know companies that only offer support via FAQ or email? Or those that only offer inbound phone calls with long wait times as the only path to resolution?
One size does not fit all when it comes to providing excellent service. The goal of call centers and their agents is to make it easy for customers to solve their problems or get information in an efficient, timely and convenient manner.
Zendesk reports that 86% of customers expect online self-service options, and a strong customer self-service option is the first line of defense against common requests, but it’s also important to offer phone support, if customers need to reach out.
How to fix
Modern contact centers understand that providing strong, multi-channel customer service is essential to success. Customers want to reach you when and how they want to reach you — chat, messaging, email, website, phone — and contact centers need to make it seamless.
Provide robust FAQs and a knowledge library of convenient self-service resources, and leverage technology to solve issues the first time to keep support volume low and increase customer experience.
Transfer clients from agent to agent
We all know this scenario all too well, you reach an agent, only to be told you need to work with another department, bouncing like a ping pong ball from one agent to another is one of the most common examples of poor customer service.
Not only does this mean that your agents don’t know how to solve problems, it also indicates that your entire operations need work as well.
When a customer calls about a specific issue, whether it’s of a complex technical nature or something more simple, there should be agents who specialize in the most challenging areas of support.
How to fix
One of the critical success factors in providing an excellent customer experience is providing first contact resolution or FCR. Customers want their issues resolved or their questions answered on the first attempt.
If FCR is not occurring frequently in your contact center, consider reviewing your current call conversion rate to uncover root causes.
Is more agent training needed? Will segmentation or specialization help support more complex service requests?
Customer service teams should be empowered with the right tools and training to help customers resolve issues on the first try. Develop and enhance the knowledge base and resources available to agents to help them better resolve customer questions and complex issues.
Asking customers to repeat what they say
Being asked to provide the same personal details, explain the nature of your issue, or anything else multiple times are all avoidable examples of a frustrating customer experience.
When customers are asked to repeat information, it leads to frustration and an unsatisfactory support experience. Customers perceive that their time is not valued or that the agent is not truly listening.
This need for redundancy is often the result of multiple or disparate software systems that don’t talk to each other.
How to fix
Contact centers must operate advanced technology solutions and modern platforms that carry customer information and agent conversations through all stages of the customer transaction, regardless of the channel. This also allows contact center leaders to monitor bottlenecks and strive for continuous improvement to enhance customer satisfaction.
Ignore customer feedback
It’s no surprise that there’s a mismatch between customer expectations and what’s delivered on the customer service end, and from the same PWC survey, “Only 38% of U.S. consumers say the employees they interact with understand their needs; 46% of consumers outside the U.S. say the same.
While you’ll likely receive feedback from customers that ranges from constructive to angry, other dissatisfied customers simply walk away and stop doing business with the company.
How to fix
Make the most of customer feedback, what does the data tell you? Analyzing and acting on data to improve customer experience can be a game changer.
Take the time to measure and track customer satisfaction and sentiment, and follow up directly on negative feedback to turn dissatisfied experiences into happy customers.
displaying rude behavior and bad attitudes
Customer service agents have one of the toughest jobs out there: protecting and building your company’s brand – no matter what customers they have to deal with.
Everyone has good days and bad days. Your customers will have times when they can’t stand the thought of talking to another employee.
The role of call center managers is to help agents remain professional and courteous in every transaction – even when the customer is “challenging” or communication is poor. The trick is to find the quickest solution to the customer’s problem and remember that there is no need to respond angrily and treat the customer in kind.
