Customer service experience is a vital cog for any business, but how vital is it? Hubspot research says, “83% of companies that believe it’s important to make customers happy also experience growing revenue.

In such a hyper competitive business era, it is important to know the consequences of bad customer service interaction and the benefits of an efficiently functioning customer support department.

Good customer service and business success are closely associated. When businesses slide their service standards, they face negative consequences with serious repercussions on the overall business.

What is bad customer service?

Bad customer service can be defined as when a business fails to meet the customer expectations in terms of service quality, response time, or overall customer experience. The factors that have a negative effect on customer service are inefficient support staff, lack of real time support, or unable to understand your customer needs.

An example of poor customer service not only worsens the existing customer relationships but also endangers the potential opportunities, and obviously erodes the bottom line of your business. According to NewVoiceMedia, an estimated $62 billion is lost by U.S. businesses each year following negative customer experiences.

Good customer service Vs Bad customer service

Good customer service really speaks for itself. It is when the customer experiences a higher level of satisfaction with the level of customer service offered by the company. Some key attributes of good customer service are:

Timely resolution of the problem

Effective solution in the first contact

Valuing customers time and feedback

Good customer service etiquette

Bad customer service results in clients’ dissatisfaction and builds a negative customer experience. It might have adverse effects on business, such as decreased customer loyalty and higher customer churn. Some key elements of poor customer service are:

Multiple touchpoints needed for resolution

Provide wrong or inaccurate information

Unreasonable payments and unexplained surcharges

Overuse of scripts to respond to customers

How poor customer service affects your business?

According to the report by WalkerInfo, customer experience will outshine price and product as the key brand differentiator by 2020. Customer experience (CX) continues to be a decisive factor for many customers. It is important for businesses to understand how a poor service experience would impact the overall brand.

Here are the implications of bad customer service:

Increase churn rate – When you deliver a great experience, customers will return back to you and on the contrary, substandard service will encourage them to churn. A single instance of bad customer service is enough to switch to a new company.

Affect brand loyalty – Customer loyalty is a strong predictor of a businesses’ long-term viability because loyal customers are durable. Poor customer service affects customer lifetime value (CLTV) as they leave you after a negative customer support experience. Loyalty and brand image are interrelated and losing loyal customers affects the overall brand.

Higher customer service costs – Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. When customer service standards decline, the number of touchpoints increases that have a drastic impact on customer service costs.

Top reasons for bad customer service examples (and how to fix them)

What are the reasons that may label business with the worst customer service tag? Let us go into details and discuss the “how-tos” that businesses can practice in order to fix bad customer service experiences.

1. Fail to offer real time support

Customers expect real time responses. Hubspot research says, “90% of customers rate “immediate response” as very important when they have queries”. It means the response time of the channels you provide should be reasonable.

Businesses that focus on delivering 24×7 real time support increases customer satisfaction that drives revenue and builds loyalty. Live chat and chatbots are the best communication channels when it comes to delivering real time support.

With live chat, businesses can deliver real time support to customers. It helps to initiate a proactive chat with website visitors & customers to provide the right guidance, stuck at a specific page on your website.

You can automate your conversations to deliver 24×7 engagement to customers when your support team is busy or not available. AI chatbots can answer the FAQs promptly and improve customer satisfaction rates.

Bad customer service example

The customer experience example of Frontier Airlines shows the importance of CX. The famous airlines miserably failed to fulfill the two core elements of customer service i.e. compassion and communication. It shows that one instance of worst customer service failure can have serious consequences.

How to fix it?

You can use live chat for offering real time sales and support assistance to customers. It means more sales conversion and higher retention. It also improves customer satisfaction and cultivates loyalty.

You can engage your customers 24×7 by chatbots. They are always available to answer simple queries, that reduce the number of support requests and improves team productivity.

You can also combine both the channels and deliver hybrid support to your customers. Use bots as the first point of contact to answer simple queries. The queries that need human support can be directed to live agents. You can witness improved customer satisfaction rates by giving customers the best of both worlds.

2. Fail to resolve in the first touchpoint

One of the principles of customer service is a faster solution in the first contact point. When the customer issue is identified in the first contact, not only is the resolution faster but the number of touchpoints is reduced.

For identifying the problems in the first contact visual engagement tools play a very important role. Gaining a visual understanding of the issue helps you to offer a concrete solution and improve customer satisfaction.

By using live engagement tools such as co-browsing and video chat, businesses can improve one of the key metrics i.e. average resolution time. These tools help your business to reverse from bad customer service to a good example.

Key takeaways:

With co-browsing, collaborate with your customers’ screen in real time and know where exactly the customer is facing the issue and help to complete the complex process or form fill up much faster.

Have direct conversations with video chat to help agents to understand the problem with clarity that further helps them to deliver the right solutions in the first contact itself. You can deliver technical support and deliver the best virtual in-person experience.

With live engagement tools, deliver faster solutions with interactive and personalized communication. It has a significant increase in customer satisfaction levels.

You can use live engagement tools to greatly increase your team productivity and deliver good customer service experience.

3. Inefficient customer support team

A dedicated support team is a great pride for any business. Not having a competent team can create the worst customer service examples.

If your business is missing out on this factor, there are chances of losing loyal customers and deflecting brand reputation and more customer complaints. This brings out the vitality of roofing a knowledgeable and competent support team.

While hiring new support reps to follow the below tips:

Make the new hires aware of the importance of achieving a high level of customer experience.

Maintain transparency as part of your customer service training module. When you are transparent to your team in conveying the goals, they will put their best efforts into meeting customer service needs and expectations.

How to fix it?

Regular training about products and etiquette should be for all employees. It should be consistent across all departments and teams.

You can share all the important business information across the whole support team to make them aware of the issues and solutions.

4. Lack of customer service etiquette

Serve your customers with a pleasing smile. Does it really happen the way it is said?

It is crucial for the support team to have the right skills and etiquette for handling customer conversations. It reduces the negative impact of customer support and help build great success stories.

Here are the key areas of customer service skills

Practice clear communication

You should convey to customers what you mean actually. Provide authentic information related to products and services to avoid future confusion among customers. Know your brand offers and discounts prior to offering to customers to maintain brand efficiency.

Understand customer psychology

Customers expect businesses should listen to their problems, value them and offer prompt solutions. The businesses that focus on understanding the psychology of customers provide a higher level of intuitive support and have better customer satisfaction.

Use positive scripts and phrases

You should design customer service scripts based on the scenarios where agents have to address customers. Positive chat transcripts and phrases can help to deliver faster responses and consistent brand experience.

Set the right expectations

You should not be over-promising to your customers, especially to the things that you cannot fulfill. Saying ‘yes’ to everything that your customer demands leads to dissatisfied customers when you turn out. So, don’t make fake commitments and set customer expectations that will break their trust and loyalty.

Key takeaways:

You should train your customer support team to be realistic and say yes to only the practical demands of customers. This leads to the right expectations and hence makes the customer experience better.

Proper training over customer service skills and etiquette will build up a dedicated team that will improve your brand reputation and increases customer loyalty.

5. Not measuring your customer service

Measuring customer service quality is one of the vital aspects of every business. If ignored, it can have a terrible impact on your business. The companies that miss out measuring customer service fail to gain below benefits:

Do not get insights into how your business is performing

Unable to know your customers’ perception of your products & services

Not able to identify the gaps between business and customers.

Thus, it negatively impacts your business in achieving complete success in team productivity, customer satisfaction, and retention.

This shows how critical it is defining customer service KPIs and measuring it regularly.

The metrics are the performance measurement used by the support teams to monitor, analyze and take necessary actions to enhance customer service success.

Here are the key KPIs & metrics to measure customer service satisfaction

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – The CSAT score tells you how satisfied customers are with your business. You directly ask your customers to rate their satisfaction with your products and services.

Average Response Time (ART): It measures the time between the customer initiates the chat and the agent responds to it. It is a very important KPI for customer service to consider for performance evaluation as it is one of the main customer complaints.

First Contact Resolution (FCR): FCR measures the efficiency of your customer support team to fix and issue on the first call. It indicates how capable your agents are in understanding and resolving the issue in the first touchpoint.

Number of touchpoints – It measures the total number of returning interactions made by the customer to get the right solution for the same issue.

How to fix it?

The higher the CSAT score the better is customer satisfaction. You can collect feedback in real time like just after purchase, to know what is or is not working.

In order to reduce your response time, you must either scale your support agents or use chatbots. Bots can handle the basic queries 24×7 when the agents are not available that reduces the number of support tickets.

6. Not taking customer feedback regularly

Have you bothered to know whether your customers are happy with your service quality, products or overall brand? If not you are missing out a key element that results in setting poor customer service examples – i.e. Customer Feedback

As it said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning. Customer feedback is a vital ingredient for the success of every business.

How to fix it?

Practice collecting customer feedback regularly. It will give a clear view of how your business is performing. You can identify the gaps between the customers and the business and end up with a product that is sheer perfection. It also opens up a conversation with customers and develops a long lasting relationship.

You can ask for feedback right after a customer service conversation, after a product demo or after a successful transaction. In order to value customer feedback and make it effective you have to analyze and act upon it.

Collect feedback from customers on a regular basis. Further, categorize it and share it with the respective departments to work on it.

Make a plan of action by consolidating all the results. Train your support team to ask the right feedback questions at the right time via the right channels.

7. Not using the right tools

One of the important aspects of good customer service is using the right tools. The tools help in reducing the negative impact of support. When you equip your business with the right tools, it can benefit your business in the following ways:

Helps to improve your team productivity

Make better communication with customers

Gain valuable insights about your customer journey

Boost customer satisfaction

Some tools that you can use to deliver a better customer experience are:

Customer engagement tools – Give your agents an omni channel engagement platform to know more about their journey and deliver consistent real time service experience across all channels by using tools like live chat, co-browsing, video chat.

Feedback tools – Use NPS or CSAT survey to measure your customer satisfaction. The resulting score determines the level of satisfaction of your customers and highlights the areas that need improvement.

How to fix it?

Identify your business needs and select the right tools to ensure a higher level of customer engagement and better customer satisfaction.

Use your customer feedback to build improved products and services to match customer expectations. Also to make them feel an important part of your business.

Final thoughts on bad customer service

Bad customer service is detrimental for any business. However, if your business is customer centric, delivering better customer experience becomes the utmost objective for your organization. By becoming CX first brand, you not only eliminate the negative impact of customer service but also build lifelong customer relationships and brand loyalty.