Bad customer service is more than just a minor inconvenience to customers—it’s a significant threat to your business and its reputation.
There's no room for subpar customer service in today’s fiercely competitive market, where alternative solutions are just a few clicks away.
Negative customer experiences can lead to bad reviews, harmful word-of-mouth chatter, and a tarnished brand perception that spreads like wildfire through social media.
This makes potential customers think twice about working with you and erodes the trust and loyalty you’ve worked hard to get with existing customers.
To stay competitive in this market, businesses must prioritize exceptional customer service at every angle through positive interactions, addressing customer needs quickly and effectively, self-help resources, and ultimately constantly working to exceed customer expectations.
This commitment to quality customer service will increase customer satisfaction, build brand loyalty, and set the company up for growth.
In this article, we’ll examine what bad customer service looks like and how to fix it, and we will share tips for avoiding subpar customer service experiences in the first place.
Bad customer service can take many forms. In simple terms, it occurs when a customer isn’t satisfied with the level of service they received from a business. This might be due to a delayed response or no response at all, a lack of empathy or knowledge, or outright disrespect.
Let’s look at some of the most common ways companies fall short in customer service.
Empathy is a customer service superpower and a required skill for excellent customer service. Customers expect support representatives to understand their issues entirely, including having a solid understanding of how a given issue might make the customer feel. Empathy enables support agents to express compassion for a situation and provide appropriate resources and solutions to resolve the problem in the best way possible.
Customer service without empathy looks cold, robotic, and impersonal. Without empathy, support agents might even provide an incorrect solution or deliver information in a way that’s difficult to understand.
Empathy lets you view the issue from the customer’s perspective and act accordingly to create a great experience.
In today’s hyper-connected world, everyone expects things to be done quickly, and the best companies satisfy that desire and use it as a competitive advantage.
Forget thirty-minute hold times, multi-day email response times, and inactive live chat representatives. These are surefire ways to create disgruntled customers.
Slow response times impact customers' perceptions of your commitment to their satisfaction. If customers reach out for help, they’re likely already having a bad experience.
Good support, including a fast response, is your opportunity to turn that negative experience into a positive customer service interaction.
Unfortunately, dealing with difficult and sometimes rude customers is part of the job in customer service. Your support team must have high emotional intelligence to respond to these situations appropriately.
No one should tolerate offensive or inappropriate treatment, but no matter the situation, it’s critical to remain calm and not take anything personally.
Even if a customer is being rude, avoid matching their temperament and work to diffuse the situation. Being rude back to a customer not only adds fuel to the fire but is also a bad customer service practice and gives the customer even more reason to be upset with your company.
Imagine contacting customer support only to find that the person helping you lacks the knowledge to solve your problem. You’re already frustrated for needing to reach out to support, and now you’ve wasted time with an agent who isn’t prepared to help you.
A good training program prepares customer service reps to help customers effectively. But it doesn’t stop at onboarding and training. As knowledge workers, customer service teams need resources and tools to access information quickly.
Quick responses are great, but not at the sacrifice of quality. Take the time to hear the customer and fully understand their needs before providing them next steps or passing them on to someone else.
Rushed interactions often lead to sloppy and inefficient work, turning an already frustrating experience into an even more aggravating one. Avoid prioritizing speed over quality at all costs.
Let’s explore how good customer service can benefit your company and how bad customer service only harms it.
Good customer service can help your company grow by creating positive word-of-mouth recommendations and a stronger brand perception.
Some common benefits companies see with providing excellent customer service are the following:
Lousy customer service drives customers away and damages your company’s reputation. In a competitive market, consistently poor service can significantly hinder growth.
Here are some reasons to avoid bad customer service:
Delivering excellent customer service is essential, but it’s not always easy. It takes the right people, practical training, processes, and resources. Let’s look at some common shortcomings in customer service and how to address each type of service issue.
Rude behavior can come from a poor choice of words, an inappropriate tone of voice, or a lack of empathy.
Whatever the case, customer support agents must have the emotional intelligence to leave personal feelings aside and respond professionally and respectfully, even if a customer is out of line.
Solution: Hire empathetic customer support agents and train them to use your company’s ideal tone of voice. Run mock scenarios where agents must diffuse a heated customer and take ownership of a difficult situation, resolving the service issue satisfactorily.
A customer in need of assistance, only to find no one is available to help them, will be a frustrated customer.
Non-urgent issues can wait until the support team is online the next day, but critical issues get exponentially more frustrating the longer it takes to get a response from the support team.
Solution: Provide omnichannel support so customers can reach you using their desired method while maintaining visibility across all channels internally. Some customers prefer phone support, while others might want email support.
Train and staff appropriately around each channel so customers get the help they need when they need it. You should also explore the idea of offering 24/7 customer service.
Few things are more discouraging than enthusiastically sharing ideas or feedback, only to be ignored. Feedback is a gift and should be treated with respect no matter how far left field it might be. Your power users and most passionate customers will have ideas, and it’s essential for them to feel heard.
Solution: Train support agents to listen carefully to customers. Repeat their feedback to them so they know you understand where they’re coming from. Whenever possible, address low-hanging fruit items or “easy wins.”
When feedback that doesn’t align with company goals is received, explain that and remember to use empathy. Lastly, offer ways to submit feedback, such as surveys or community forums.
Automation in customer support is critical for building a scalable customer service organization. Whether automating responses using AI and chatbots or automating behind-the-scenes workflows to make agents more efficient, automation is a must-have ingredient in modern-day customer service teams.
Still, many companies are failing to implement automation, or they’re doing it poorly, resulting in more manual work, delayed responses, and less happy customers.
Solution: Deploy automation where it matters most. Fully automated customer support isn’t the answer. The best approach is a combination of automated and human support. Test automation frequently to ensure workflows are running smoothly and any auto-response systems like AI are providing relevant and accurate responses.
Some companies simply fail to handle a customer’s inquiry. Whether it’s a question, technical need, or another service issue, sometimes customer inquiries get lost in the mix due to sloppy processes, ill-equipped and poorly trained agents, or broken escalation paths.
Solution: Track resolution times on each inquiry and alert management or senior agents about long-running tickets. Create escalation paths for senior agents or leadership to handle critical service issues. Measure customer satisfaction to ensure each inquiry is dealt with appropriately.
You can try your hardest to avoid bad customer service experiences, but the truth is, things will go wrong from time to time.
No matter how well-trained your team is or how many tools and systems you use to provide efficient and effective support, you will drop the ball occasionally and have a disgruntled customer on your hands.
How you react to customer service failures is equally important to avoiding them, and that’s where the service recovery paradox comes in.
The service recovery paradox is the idea that customers can actually gain trust and loyalty in your brand when you respond to a customer service issue the right way. For example, let’s say a restaurant server accidentally spills a glass of wine on you during a fancy date night.
The second response is much more likely to gain a loyal customer due to how they responded with all hands on deck and compensating you for the mishap.
The lesson here is don’t panic when you’ve created a bad customer service experience. Instead, think about how to respond to the situation to improve it and build a stronger relationship with the impacted customer.
Customer service mistakes happen, but when they occur so regularly that customers start to lose trust in your company, that’s when you have a real problem. Consistently bad customer service damages customer relationships and tarnishes your brand's reputation.
Subpar customer service is often the result of mismanaged priorities from the top down. It takes a leadership team that truly believes in customer service as a growth engine to build a world-class customer support team.
But with the right people, processes, and systems, you can build a customer service team your customers will love.
PartnerHero has helped companies large and small improve their quality of customer service. If you’re interested in learning how we can help you avoid creating bad customer service experiences, reach out to chat.
