The 21st century is the era of the customer. Companies are not just concerned but obsessed with their customers. With competition increasing, outstanding customer service has become the nucleus to a business's success.

This is all reasonable because it takes only a single poor customer experience for the client to leave your business. Likewise, one outstanding customer experience might transform a regular customer into a loyal one and even perhaps a brand ambassador.

In fact, poor customer service costs companies more than $75 billion every year. Issues like extended wait times, unprepared agents, and even tech issues like slow or a downed website can all interfere with customer satisfaction. You see, customers may never recall a particular product or a member of a company's staff, but they'll never forget the direct interaction with the business. And who's at the forefront of this direct interaction? Naturally, your customer service unit.

So, you might ask yourself, is there a solution to this challenge? Well, of course, there is—providing better and improved customer service to your clients and creating a lot more positive customer experiences than negative ones. Nevertheless, delivering quality products or services alongside exceptional customer service is a considerable challenge to even giant corporations and organizations worldwide.

To give you an insight into how to overcome such challenges and know how to respond effectively and on time, read on and learn the five most significant customer service issues and their tangible solutions. But first, let's take a look at how improving specific customer service standards by addressing customer service issues can influence your business's success.

How Handling Customer Service Problems Is Crucial To Your Business’s Success

Customers are interacting with your business daily, and your customer service team will eventually encounter challenges and roadblocks along the way. As it happens, the success of your business will depend on how skillfully your team handles the customer service problems.

Keep in mind that you would have won a customer for a lifetime if you can resolve their customer service issues successfully. Happy clients will return to your business, again and again, increasing revenue and profits at the same time.

In contrast, if the handling and customer service problem solving is poor, expect your customers to run to your closest competitor and take their money elsewhere. So, despite knowing the actual benefits of a positive customer service experience, the question remains why it is so hard to deliver it consistently.

Customer service jobs are really challenging. Queries, problems, or complaints, you never know what’s in store for you next. However, there are certain areas in customer support that companies need to keep in mind to efficiently overcome everyday challenges and work on customer relationship management.

Please continue reading to grasp the most significant customer service issues your company may face and learn how to resolve them successfully.

5 Biggest Customer Service Issues And How To Resolve Them

Issue #1: Customer Service Can’t Provide An Immediate Answer  

Do you know that 82% of customers expect a prompt response to customer service problems and inquiries? Even when your customer support agents aren’t able to respond to their message in full, clients still expect some notification that their message has been received and if they get a rough timeline of when you’ll be able to address their problem—even better.

In today’s world of impulse buying and instant gratification, failure to respond to particular customer issues can cost you revenue and do heavy damage to your business’s reputation.  

The Solution: Automatic Responses And Knowledge Bases

The most straightforward way to provide instant answers to your customers is by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence technology and its subsets, especially natural language processing and machine learning.

By recognizing specific trigger keywords, like “full refund” or “schedule appointment,” chatbots that are powered by artificial intelligence software like Y Meadows’ solution model can automatically send out canned responses that will allow clients to get the solutions they seek without having to speak to an official representative and in a matter of seconds. These intelligent chatbots can also send out automatic follow-ups, appointment confirmations via email or SMS and confirm that the support requests have been received.

Likewise, having an online knowledge base on your website can make it easier for customers and customer support agents to quickly search for relevant assistance with an ongoing issue and provide a more human touch.

Issue #2: Irritated Customers

Angry, irritated, confused customers are an infelicitous everyday occurrence for customer service reps. Despite that, when that anger gets out of hand, your customer team members need to know exactly what to do.

It doesn’t matter if the customer is a constant complainer, an aggressive bully, or just indecisive; your team needs solutions in hand to help everyone keep their cool and make sure that the entire interaction remains customer-centric.

The Solution: Proper Training, Education And Recognition  

Much like you train your workforce on using the latest customer management software, you should also teach them how to react to difficult situations and tricky customers.

The key here is to be patient, let the angry customer speak, and sporadically ask questions to ensure that you’ve understood their problem well. This way, even if your agent couldn’t give them the proper solution the client’s looking for, you will at least make them feel heard.

You can also offer irritated customers threatening to cancel your products or terminate their contract, some discount or a free upgrade if you want to keep the account with your business. There should also be a clear HR policy in place for how employees should respond and report to difficult conversations with clients.

Nevertheless, the reality is that no matter how well you train, educate, and prepare your workforce, eliminating angry, unsatisfied customers is practically impossible. This is where employee recognition enters the equation, especially since over 60% of employees say they’d leave their job if they didn’t feel appreciated by upper management.

Issue #3: Customers Can’t Reach You On Their Preferred Channels

In a recent survey, 90% of customers say that they now expect businesses to provide outstanding customer service on more than one communication channel. And while you’d like to be more available to your customers, you might be concerned about how your company will keep up with social media platforms, video, chat messaging, and website support all at once.

The Solution: Embracing Omnichannel Customer Communication Methods

Omnichannel customer communication tools allow customers to select whether they’d like to connect with your business by phone, on social media, via email, SMS, or even through a video call. After all, it’s way easier to resolve a customer service issue when the customer can choose the way they want to speak with a customer service agent.

You can also utilize software solutions to identify which channel your clients often use to reach out to you. This way, you can focus your customer service efforts on the channels that your customers will most likely use.  

Besides, omnichannel communication allows real-time customer history and data syncing across channels. This prevents clients from repeating the same problem on multiple occasions as they will speak to a new agent unfamiliar with their ongoing issue.

Issue #4: The Customer Service Workflow Is Not Aligned With Your Customers’ Journey

In brief, a customer journey map is a diagram that illustrates the steps or touchpoints customers go through when interacting with your company. Aligning your customer service workflow with the customer journey map means understanding the information customers may need at different stages of their journey.

For example, you may be an eCommerce business with a top-grade store, fantastic product descriptions, and a seamless checkout process. Still, when clients want delivery updates, your agents are clueless. To avoid this, customer service representatives need access to all the information to assist clients through their journey effectively. So the more accurate and seamless each workflow is, the better stitched together the overall customer journey will be.

The Solution: Reconstruct Your Customer Service Workflow To Align With The Customer Journey Map

Draw a new customer journey map, this time making sure that appropriate customer support is available at every touchpoint. Provide all necessary information to your customer service agents to address customer queries and understand different positions that the customers get into while interacting with your company.

Besides, make sure that feedback is taken on board so that you can quickly narrow down the bottlenecks of your customer service workflow. Encourage collaboration between company departments when solving customers’ issues and try setting a service level agreement for minimum response and resolution time.

Moreover, by blending customer personas and digital customer journey mapping with the help of machine learning-powered software, you will be able to predict client behavior in real-time and create personalized suggestions and recommendations to drive your customer service efforts to the next level.

Issue #5: You Are Not Taking Customer Feedback

Probably the most significant customer service oversight that companies make is not giving their customers a chance to voice their opinions. Without surveys, your company might be missing valuable insights from the people who’re the most likely to purchase your products or services.

The Solution: Customer Surveys And Feedback

The best place to access customer feedback and get their honest opinions is through customer surveys. In case you’re not handing them out, chances are your customer service support will never improve.

Common survey topics should include the level of satisfaction with support, likelihood to suggest your company to a friend or family or work with your business again in the future, preferred products or services, suggestions for improvement, information on how the product or service assists customers to achieve their goals, etc.

These customer surveys can include yes/no questions, ratings from 1-5 stars, long-form questions, and even emojis. Whatever you decide on implementing within your customer service efforts, make sure that the surveys can be completed on multiple communication channels and that you send out these surveys right after the support request is complete.

In Conclusion

As competition is getting fiercer and fiercer in the global marketplace, arising customer service problems are genuinely inevitable. And sometimes, it can be pretty challenging to keep up with the ever-evolving innovations and techniques that have immense control over your customer experience, no matter how great your business model is.

Nevertheless, because people want to feel special, it will always be the fantastic customer service that will make them come back for more. By adequately addressing the customer service problems in your company, you want your clients to walk away from the interaction with your business feeling not only satisfied with the outcome but understood, valued, and prioritized. Try adopting the solutions mentioned above to upgrade your customer service game and delight the people who make your business.