No matter how great your products or services are, some customers are bound to run into problems. That’s an unavoidable truth of business — but you can still avoid losing unhappy customers by dealing with them in the right way.
Interactions with your support team can make all the difference in how your unhappy customers behave. A negative interaction could lead them to write off your company forever, while a positive one could convert them into a loyal customer for life.
In this article, we’ll look at how your customer service team can create positive experiences that can prevent dissatisfied customers from churning.
What makes customers unhappy?
To ensure you keep your customers satisfied, you must first understand what can cause frustration and unhappiness. Here are some common reasons that can tick your customers off:
- Poor or bad experiences
- Being put on hold or made to wait
- Poor quality, defective products
- Bugs and technical issues
- Bad customer service
- Lack of availability of a product
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the reasons that can make your customers unhappy. Going through previous customer complaints and feedback can help you find customer concerns that are unique to your business.
How to deal with unhappy customers?
Providing great customer support is essential for winning back irate customers — and the following seven tips will help you adjust your approach to accomplish this goal.
1. Be empathetic
Empathy is essential for understanding where a customer is coming from and for taking the conversation forward accordingly.
For busy support teams, it can be tempting to jump to a solution as quickly as possible.
Unfortunately, this means rushing the customer through an explanation of their problem. And while this may be the fastest way to understand what’s going on, it’s not the most effective.
So at the start of every interaction, aim to fully understand the customer’s point of view and make the customer feel heard before offering a solution.
Then, focus on helping meet their needs — and make it a priority over merely offering the right answer.
2. Practice active listening
Active listening refers to making small verbal and non-verbal acknowledgments throughout the conversation to make sure the other person feels heard.
By practicing active listening, you’re allowing the customer to vent while showing that you’re paying close attention to their issue. Without asking any leading questions, you might get most of the information you need to offer a solution. You can arrive at solutions faster while helping the customer calm down.
3. Apologize for your mistakes
Most customers reach out with a simple question or because they want clarification on a feature or policy. Others will contact you because your company made an error. And in this case, it’s essential to admit that error and offer a genuine apology.
Whether there was a shipping error in your warehouse, misinformation on your site, or something else entirely, acknowledging the mistake is an essential first step. Then, reassure your customers that you’ll take appropriate steps to fix the error. This way, they can be confident in continuing to purchase or work with your company in the future.
4. Ensure fast responses and resolutions
You’re only adding fuel to the fire when you put an angry customer on hold or make them wait long hours. Delays in responses and resolutions can further frustrate unhappy customers. In fact, every 12 hours of delay in response can lead to a 9.6% drop in CSAT.
Whether it’s replying to a message or offering a solution, you need to ensure that you’re racing against the clock. Investing in a good customer service software can go a long way in helping you deliver timely responses and resolutions. For instance, with Freshdesk, you can:
- Set up SLAs for responses and resolutions
- Improve internal collaboration to allow for faster answers
- Gather customer context in an instant by integrating different customer support channels and applications
5. Offer clear explanations
When a customer alerts you to a problem, your primary goal will likely be to solve it in a minimal amount of time. And that’s great!
But you should also aim to offer a clear explanation of why that problem occurred. This step often only takes a few extra seconds but can help the customer better understand what went wrong and eliminate any concerns about whether it will be a recurring issue.
6. Make sure the customer is satisfied
Once you’ve solved a customer’s immediate issue, you might assume that your job is done.
But it’s not always safe to assume that fixing the problem at hand is enough. Instead, make sure to always ask each customer whether they’re satisfied with the resolution you’ve provided. You can do this by following up and asking if everything’s been okay or even by sending a feedback form.
This way, you can address any additional concerns they might have — then be confident that you’ve provided the level of service they were looking for.
7. Remember that your customers are people
Finally, it’s essential to keep in mind throughout all of your interactions that your customers are people. Now, this might sound obvious. But when a customer writes a negative review or complains about an issue, it’s easy to see them as a problem to be resolved instead of a person to be helped. And that mindset is unlikely to help you provide excellent support.
So every time a customer reaches out, remember that they’re a real person with a real problem, and do your best to fully resolve their issue. This will not only make your interactions go more smoothly, but will also make you more effective in providing genuinely helpful solutions — and, as a result, winning back unhappy customers.
Response template for unhappy customers
In any customer service situation, the words you use can help you effectively navigate it or make things worse. Here are a few go-to response templates that you can use to interact with unhappy customers.
Apology template
Hey <customer name>,
We’re sorry you’ve encountered this issue.
Our best minds are working hard on fixing this. You can expect a solution by <date>. I’ll be sure to notify you once this is done. Meanwhile, do reach out to me if you need help with anything at all.
Once again, we’re sorry for the inconvenience.
Best
<Agent name>
Follow-up template
Hi <customer name>,
Hope you’re doing well.
Please let me know if <issue> troubles you again. I’d be glad to jump on a call and help you sort it out.
If you have any other questions, just let me know and I’ll be glad to help.
<Agent name>
Customer win-back template
Hey <customer name>,
We’re really sorry that you have decided to move on.
Is there anything at all that we can help you reconsider your decision?
We can extend a <discount/free service> and ensure that you are nothing less than satisfied.
Awaiting your response.
Best
<Agent name>
How to turn unhappy customers into your biggest fans?
Unhappy customers pose a huge threat to your business. In addition to churning and affecting revenue, an unhappy customer can also do some serious damage to your brand’s reputation. However, with a few simple steps, you can salvage any situation and turn unhappy customers into the biggest fans.
1. Fix issues quickly and effectively
Make sure you fix all the bugs, lapses in experiences, and product deficiencies your customers point out, no matter how big or small they are. You can win back an unhappy customer’s trust by taking active corrective measures.
2. Go the extra mile
Sometimes, all a customer is looking for is a quick, straightforward response. In these cases, it’s perfectly acceptable to resolve their request within a matter of minutes and move on.
But in other cases, you’ll see the opportunity to go the extra mile. — and taking advantage of that opportunity can go a long way. For example, when this customer lost his Warby Parker sunglasses, he reached out to the NYC restaurant where he’d last seen them on Twitter.
And although the restaurant was unable to help, Warby Parker responded by asking the customer to contact them.
The company was not at all responsible for this mistake. But a few days later, the customer posted another tweet showing that Warby Parker had sent a free replacement pair, along with candy and a handwritten note.
Though they had no obligation to help, Warby Parker invested in service recovery — and likely earned a loyal customer for life.
3. Respond publicly, resolve privately
Even if fingers are being pointed without reason, you need to make sure you stay calm and uphold your brand’s reputation.
Sometimes, unhappy customers can be difficult. It’s important to apologize, in public if needed, make things right, and follow up without giving in to your emotions. This way, once the solution has been offered, the customer can look back at the situation and see that you’ve tried your best to help them. You might even gain a positive review or a referral from the customer.
How can you prevent unhappy customers?
While it is impossible to keep all customers happy all the time, you can take measures to ensure that you reduce the number of unhappy clients you have at a given time by following these four tips:
1. Be proactive
Most customers only reach out to you when they encounter issues. However, if you’ve identified that there’s something wrong, you shouldn’t wait for them to reach out. Take a proactive approach and reach out to your customers before the issue escalates.
With Freshdesk, you can even take proactive customer service initiatives like offering self-service and setting up a help widget that pops up whenever a customer shows visible signs of frustration.
2. Personalize experiences
Each of your customers is different.
And though many of their problems may be largely the same, the best approach to solving them can vary. This means you should avoid using canned, templated responses. Even if the solution itself is relatively straightforward, you need to make sure that the customer feels understood and acknowledged.
Taking an extra 30 seconds or so to address them by name, look at their previous interactions, and write a unique response can go a long way in achieving this goal, and improve the customer’s overall experience with your brand.
3. Act on customer feedback
Customer feedback is a treasure trove that helps you understand common challenges right from your customers themselves.
You can get insights on issues that could make customers unhappy. And by acting on these insights, you can prevent these customer problems from escalating. This can help you improve customer satisfaction too.
Customer feedback also highlights your customers’ thoughts about your products, service, and pricing. You can use this information to define and refine your strategies to enhance customer experience.
4. Listen on social media
Not all of your customers will immediately reach out when they have an issue. Unfortunately, many of them will first take to social media channels to share their complaints with friends and families.
That’s why today, social listening is an increasingly common customer service strategy. For example, J.Crew has a dedicated support Twitter account and uses it to respond to customers on the platform.
The majority of the responses from this account apologize for the customer’s dissatisfaction and encourage them to reach out with more information. Even this simple gesture shows customers that the company cares about their experience, and can open up a conversation that will help the brand address their customers’ unhappiness.
Turn unhappy customers into promoters with Freshdesk
Customer service plays a significant role in customer retention. Your team can only deliver great customer service when they have a reliable customer service software that helps them do their job in a smarter, easier way. With a customer service software like Freshdesk, your team can turn any situation around by offering fast, personalized support that customers love.
Take Freshdesk for a free spin.
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