7 Tips To Handle Customer Complaints Effectively


Published: | By Tim Ferguson

Are you tired of receiving complaints? When left unattended, they lead to long negative reviews impacting your future sales. Hence, it’s crucial to keep your current customer base content along with landing new customers. 

This is where chatbots come into play. 

Customers expect immediate solutions to their queries. Delayed responses can make customers upset, which can lead to negative reviews online. Automating your customer support with chatbots can play a vital role in dealing with such frustrated customers. 

A chatbot can be an effective communication tool that allows your customers to reach out to you on your website. Plus, if you give it a unique personality that suits your brand image, company goals, and website design, it can act as a digital assistant working for you 24/7. 

However, some major chatbot issues leave support agents with even angrier customers. To ensure your chatbot handles customer complaints effectively, here is a chatbot guide to know more, and below are some tips you can use.

Best Tips for Handling Customer Complaints Effectively

  1. Handle complaints effectively on multiple platforms
  2. Improve your chatbot accuracy by monitoring activity
  3. Avoid using chatbots with narrow AI
  4. Provide effective responses before connecting to an agent
  5. The convenience of getting answers over text
  6. Feed chatbots with the right data
  7. 24/7 service ensures happy customers

 

Handle complaints effectively on multiple platforms 

A big business handling multiple platforms needs an effective customer complaint management system.

Managing complaints by individuals becomes difficult when you have various platforms to manage. Hiring different individuals for every platform is a troublesome and expensive task. 

Additionally, when you hire people, they might delay responding to complaints. Dissatisfied customers often expect immediate attention to their queries. 

To efficiently handle complaints across diverse platforms, skip the hassle of hiring separate teams. Instead, opt for a free Helpdesk ticketing system. It centralizes customer grievances, streamlining the process and ensuring quick responses to satisfy customers seeking immediate attention to their concerns.

Make sure you handle complaints on multiple platforms without any delays. A quick response might save you from negative Facebook posts or google reviews, preventing people from using your product or service. Even one negative review can prevent you from landing clients or closing deals. 

Improve your chatbot accuracy by monitoring activity 

Activity monitoring will help you understand how well the chatbot responds to upset and frustrated customers. It’s time to make changes if it can hardly provide relevant solutions and lead to dead-end conversations. 

Sometimes your chatbot isn’t aware of specific services that your customers demand. This often leads to a bad customer experience.

People expect chatbots to understand every request, query, or complaint. Activity monitoring will help you understand the way a chatbot responds and how you can improve it. After monitoring user activity, update your chatbot for better results. Make sure you remove useless expressions, merge intents, avoid duplicates, etc. 

You can prevent dissatisfied customers once you monitor activity and update your chatbot. It’s crucial to learn from every bad experience and ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Avoid using chatbots with narrow AI 

There are different types of chatbots, and companies using chatbots with narrow AI often end up with disappointed customers. Customers complain that the chatbot hardly understands their queries or takes them in the wrong sense. 

Out of the many chatbots companies use, contextual chatbots are effective in handling customer complaints. They understand and learn from conversations instead of flowing in a set pattern. 

Chatbots that are fed answers in a flow often get confused with questions. These chatbots are highly effective but require planning and guidance to work.

Human conversations already deal with multiple barriers, including wrong pronunciation, double meanings, misused phrases, slang, etc. 

Now imagine the message typed by a customer that's really unhappy. A chatbot with a narrow AI is likely to give irrelevant answers, thereby making the person more upset. 

The person will likely ask for an agent if the chatbot fails at understanding the issue. Let’s take a look at the worst-case scenario.

screenshot of text conversation using a chatbotSource

What’s the point of conversing with a chatbot if it can’t directly contact an agent when needed. No one likes to go through all these procedures to get their complaints heard. 

Now let’s take a look at some of the statistics regarding chatbot and customer satisfaction.

graph showing use cases for chatbots

Source

37% of people are looking forward to a quick answer. This implies you must cut out irrelevant answers or wait for long before connecting an agent. 

Provide effective responses before connecting to an agent 

Nowadays, chatbots are programmed in a manner that understands human emotions and sends responses accordingly. Understanding sentiments plays a crucial role in improving relationships with your customers

Chatbots can sense positive, negative, or neutral responses and treat customers accordingly. This information is further passed to the agent to ensure he rightly handles the annoyed customer. 

The frustration increases when people are waiting to get in touch with an agent. You wouldn’t want your super annoyed customers to wait patiently for a representative to get back to them. They need immediate solutions to their issues followed by contacting personnel if it’s on a whole different level. 

The convenience of getting answers over text 

Remember that annoyed customers mostly reach out to brands through messaging. They aren’t comfortable with directly calling them. These messages should never go unseen for hours. 

Messages can easily take longer to respond to when representatives deal with them. Messaging app bots can end up providing a more human experience. 

Feed chatbots with the right data 

Chatbots need relevant data regarding customers, conversations, queries, etc., to provide the desired result. Make sure you prepare the chatbot for the worst-case scenario. Provide all types of valuable data, including frequent customer complaints, for a prompt response. 

Research conducted by Userlike showed that 68% of people love how quickly and effectively chatbots respond to their queries. After a prompt response, they don’t mind waiting to get in touch with a human agent for further discussion.

graph showing positive results from unhappy customers

Source

24/7 service ensures happy customers 

What if a person complains at odd hours like midnight?

Chatbots ensure a prompt response 24/7, thereby ensuring your customers don’t go to bed cursing your brand. People are impatient, and they cannot wait till you are convenient to get back to them. 

When a chatbot takes care of a severe issue, it protects your reputation, which can otherwise be badly scarred. Some chatbots are so efficient that they confuse people, whether it’s a real person behind the screen. 

Summing Up

Use these tips to ensure your dissatisfied customers end up being content with the answers they receive. Provide them with the convenience they need to prefer you over your competitors. 

Remember that unhappy customers are good for your business as they provide you with valuable feedback. Take this as a chance to improve and make necessary changes to prevent future consequences and improve customer loyalty.

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Author Bio:

Tim Ferguson is a writer and editor of Marketing Digest. He enjoys writing about SEO, content marketing, online reputation management, social media, AI, and Big Data. When he is not writing and editing for Marketing Digest, he spends time on learning more about content marketing and getting better at it.

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