How to Identify and Address The 5 Most Common Customer Problems | #customersupport #supporticket

One of the main roles of a customer support team is to identify customer needs and find solutions to customer problems. Dissatisfied customers will bring their issues to your attention by sharing negative feedback via social media, chat, email, while other unhappy customers won’t even report their issues but simply switch to one of your competitors.

Instead of fully relying on your customers to alert you about their struggles, your customer service reps will need to take a proactive approach to identify and address common customer complaints. Therefore, it is important to train your customer service agents to deal with either of these scenarios and go the extra mile to reduce customer churn.

Now that you’ve enabled your customer service team to handle customer issues, let us understand how you can use these to your advantage.

Why is it important to identify customer issues?

Customer experience depends on how you make your customers feel. If you don’t have a customer experience strategy yet, you should start by identifying customer problems using active listening skills because only 1 in 26 unhappy customers will take the time to complain. The remaining 25 will churn and stop buying from your company.

So if you’re not yet taking a proactive approach to identifying and handling customer issues, you’re missing the opportunity to address your customers’ needs before they leave your company altogether. On the upside, this means that taking steps towards identifying customer problems could make a major impact on your retention rates. It could be exactly what you need to achieve the kind of growth you want.

• You can analyze the negative feedback to dive deeper into customer needs
• Service providers can learn about the gaps in their service experience and make amends
• Product managers can leverage customer complaints to make changes in the product roadmap
• Common performance metrics such as long response times may be a clear indicator of low operational efficiency or other process inefficiencies

How do you identify customer problems?

Deciding what you want to prioritize while addressing your customer problems is easy but knowing where to begin is a little more challenging. Your customers may or may not report their issues and it’s your responsibility to gauge your customer satisfaction and understand how you can bridge the gaps so you can continue to build your pool of loyal customers. You can take any of these approaches to understand your customer needs better.

• Streamline customer feedback: Did your customer purchase a new product? Did they sign up for a service upgrade? It’s important to collect feedback from your customers at different stages of their interaction with you. Customer feedback gives you insights on how your customer feels and what they expect of you.
• Practice active listening: The first step to active listening is hearing what customers have to say and making them feel valued and heard. Customer service teams should be trained to leverage their communication skills and active listening skills to understand customer needs, appease upset customers and deliver good customer service. 
• Ask the right questions: There are different types of customers but the right questions can lead you to the right answers. Asking your customers about what their expectations are can unearth their latent needs and help the customer service team to find solutions before your customers realize the need for it.
• Follow up with your customers: Most companies believe they have effectively solved issues during the first interaction in 76% of service interactions. But when the same customers are asked, only 40% agree. Make sure you follow up with your customers after your interactions to check if they were satisfied with the solution provided.

On your journey to solve your customer issues, here are additional resources you may find helpful in identifying those issues.

Once you have identified the customer pain points and challenges in delivering a seamless customer experience, you can work towards creating a great customer service strategy that works for your business and enables you to meet your customer expectations. 

We understand that it’s easier said than done. So, we’ve compiled the 5 most common customer complaints and shared the different ways to handle these issues.

How do you solve the most common customer problems?

1. Unable to access the right resources

The easier you make it for customers to find answers to their queries, the more likely they are to continue doing business with you. Customers want answers without the need to interact with a service agent. This even helps customer service reps focus on more complex issues and boost their productivity.

Possible solutions:

• • Build a self-service portal and empower your customers with readily available resources like FAQs and knowledge base.
  • Deploy a multilingual knowledge base so customers can find it easily by searching for questions in their native language.
  • Monitor and update your FAQ page as and when you introduce a new feature or see a surge of new customer concerns.
  • Make your knowledge base content available across different touchpoints like chat, website, and mobile app to improve visibility of resources.

2. Long wait times

Your customer may have reached out to you over phone call, chat, social media or message, and there may be instances when customers might have complained about long wait times. If that’s the case, you may want to understand the reason behind this inconvenience. Does your business have enough customer service employees to manage the workload? Is there a fundamental problem with your product or service that is causing repetitive customer complaints?

Possible solutions:

• • Set realistic expectations for your customers by underlining response time in your SLA.
  • Use AI powered customer service software to help service departments keep track of incoming customer queries, prioritize tickets, and automatically assign tickets based on skills/ workload/department.
  • Create canned response templates to make it easier for service agents to respond to your customers at the earliest.

3. Need to repeat information

Customers will get frustrated if they need to repeat their information again and again. This may happen when multiple agents are engaged in solving the same ticket or when a service agent is unable to access customer information for complete context on what the issue might be.

Possible solutions:

• • Deploy a customer service software with a built-in unified dashboard. Regardless of the communication channel used by your customers to share their queries, you can use a unified dashboard to store and access your customer data easily.
  • If you have a smaller support team, use a shared inbox to manage a high volume of customer interactions. It will help you to track who is working on what, view recent customer replies, or collaborate within and across teams. So if you haven’t yet done so, set up a system for collecting feedback.

4. Poor customer service communication

One unpleasant experience with a customer service representative can lead to customers letting go of their relationship with your company entirely. Some of your customers may reach out for further clarification if they’re confused about your products or services. But there will be a handful who don’t reach out even if they have trouble understanding something.

Possible solutions:

• • Encourage your agents to practice active listening during customer interactions. Intently listening to customer feedback about their experience can make them feel heard.
  • Train your customer support agents to apologize in case of any miscommunication, stay calm and take the time to understand what caused their confusion.
  • Enable your customer service agents with required product knowledge to tackle customer issues around the same.
  • Use collaborative helpdesk features to connect with members from different teams to help you resolve specific customer queries.

5. Lack of customer support channels

There may be instances when you are unable to track customer complaints because your customers are unable to contact you. Here are a few questions that may help you figure if your support channels are enough for your customers? Which channels do your customers prefer to contact you? Is your customer service team enabled to tackle incoming customer issues from multiple channels?

Possible solutions:

• • Make your contact details (phone number, email ID, social media accounts from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc) available on your website and app. Your customers are likely to search for your customer service channels when they need to interact with you.
  • Deploy a customer service software that supports all or most of the channels you offer support on to help collate all customer queries on a single platform, making it easier for customer service reps to prioritize and respond to these queries.
  • Create a customer portal that reflects your brand and gives your customers visibility into the status of their service request.

Conclusion

Your customers won’t always let you know when they have an issue with a product or service. Although it may seem like extra work in the short term, it’s in your best interest to identify those issues so that you can address them well in time.

Fortunately, the guide above will make it easier for you to identify and address these customer issues. Start by analyzing customer feedback and ask the right questions to unearth the reasons for any confusion or issues. Once you address a customer problem, you eliminate the chances that they’ll become problems for even more customers in the future- ultimately saving your business time and money.

Originally published on Aug 14, 2018. Updated on May 23, 2022.