Poor customer service is more than just a minor inconvenience to customers—it’s a significant threat to your business and its reputation. 

Bad customer experiences can lead to negative reviews, harmful word-of-mouth, and a tarnished brand perception that can spread like wildfire.

This makes potential customers think twice about working with you and erodes the trust and loyalty you’ve worked hard to get with existing customers.

Let’s look at what poor customer service in general looks like, how to fix it, and share tips for avoiding subpar customer experiences in the first place. 

What does poor customer service actually look like?

Bad customer service can take many forms. In very simple terms, it means that a customer isn’t satisfied with the level of service they received from a business. 

This might be due to a delayed response or no response at all, a lack of empathy or knowledge, or outright disrespect—there could be many different reasons for why someone is left with a bad taste in their mouth.

Let’s look at some of the most common ways companies fall short in customer service, including:

• Lack of empathy
• Slow responses and long wait times
• Rude interactions
• Lack of understanding
• Rushed interactions

Lack of empathy

Empathy is a customer service superpower and a required skill for excellent customer service. 

Customers expect support agents to fully understand their issues, including having a solid understanding of how a given issue might make the customer feel. 

Empathy enables support agents to express compassion for a situation and provide appropriate resources and solutions to resolve the problem in the best way possible.

Slow responses and long wait times

Today, everyone expects things to be done quickly, and the best companies satisfy that desire and use it as a competitive advantage. 

Slow response times impact customers' perceptions of your commitment to their satisfaction. If customers reach out for help, they’re likely already having a bad experience. 

Good support, including a fast response, is your opportunity to turn that negative experience into a positive customer service interaction.

Rude interactions

Unfortunately, dealing with difficult and sometimes rude customers is part of the job in customer service. 

Your support team has to have high emotional intelligence to respond to these situations appropriately. 

No one should tolerate offensive or inappropriate treatment, but no matter the situation, it’s critical to remain calm and not take anything personally. 

Even if a customer is being rude, avoid matching their temperament and work to diffuse the situation. 

Lack of understanding

Imagine contacting customer support only to find that the person helping you lacks the knowledge to solve your problem. 

A good training program prepares customer service reps to help customers effectively. But it doesn’t stop at onboarding and training. 

As knowledge workers, customer service teams need the appropriate resources and tools to access information quickly.

Rushed interactions

Quick responses are great, but not at the sacrifice of quality. Take the time to hear the customer and fully understand their needs before providing them next steps or passing them on to someone else. 

Rushed interactions often lead to sloppy and inefficient work, turning an already frustrating experience into an even more aggravating one. Avoid prioritizing speed over quality at all costs.

Good customer service vs. poor customer service

Let’s explore how good customer service can benefit your company and how poor customer service only harms it.

The benefits of good customer service

Good customer service can help your company grow by creating positive word-of-mouth recommendations and a stronger brand perception.

Some common benefits companies see with providing excellent customer service are the following:

• Customer retention: A positive customer experience helps retain your customers as it shows you value them beyond the sales pipeline.
• Positive ROI: Customer service starts in the sales process during a potential customer's first interaction with your brand. A study by Accenture found 3.5x in revenue growth for companies that view customer service as a value center instead of a cost center.
• Competitive advantage: Sadly, many companies still don’t prioritize customer service. If you work to exceed customer expectations whenever possible, you’ll have a better chance of outperforming your competitors and building a more loyal customer base.
• Customer loyalty: You’ll likely lose more customers than necessary if you tolerate poor customer service. On the other hand, excellent customer service gives your customers more reason to stick around. 

The consequences of poor customer service

Lousy customer service drives customers away and damages your company’s reputation. In a competitive market, consistently poor service can significantly hinder growth. 

Here are some of the main reasons to avoid bad customer service:

• Decreased customer satisfaction: Providing bad customer service creates unhappy customers who are likely to tell friends or colleagues about their service experience. Ultimately, this results in less loyalty and potential damage to your brand.
• Lower conversation rate: A bad reputation for customer service can reach potential customers, resulting in a lower conversion rate. Likewise, if you’re not providing excellent customer service throughout the sales process, this could be seen as a red flag, leading prospects away from you and to your competitors. 
• Increased costs: It’s far cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to find new ones. Building and maintaining a world-class customer service team is an investment, but it will save you money in the long term..
• Employee turnover: If everyone doesn’t prioritize high-quality customer service, your support team won’t have the tools, resources, or encouragement to do their job well, creating an uninspiring and stressful work environment.
• Customer churn: Poor customer service deteriorates trust with customers and puts them at greater risk of taking their business elsewhere. Earning people’s trust back is way more difficult the second time, so it’s important to maintain a great level of service.

Examples of poor customer service and how to avoid/fix them

Delivering excellent customer service is essential, but it’s not always easy. It takes the right people, practical training, processes, and resources. 

Let’s look at some common shortcomings in customer service and how to address each type of issue.

When an agent is rude

Rude behavior can come from a poor choice of words, an inappropriate tone of voice, or a lack of empathy. 

Whatever the case, customer support agents have to have the emotional intelligence to leave personal feelings aside and respond professionally and respectfully, even if a customer is out of line.

Solution: Hire empathetic customer support agents and train them to use your company’s preferred tone of voice. Run mock scenarios where agents have to diffuse a heated customer and take ownership of a difficult situation.

When it’s difficult to reach the support team

A customer in need of assistance, only to find no one is available to help them, will be a frustrated customer. 

Non-urgent issues can wait until the support team is online, but critical issues get exponentially more frustrating the longer it takes to get a response from the support team. 

Solution: Provide omnichannel support so customers can reach you using their desired method while maintaining visibility across all channels internally. Train and staff appropriately around each channel so customers get the help they need when they need it. 

When you disregard customer feedback

Few things are more discouraging than enthusiastically sharing ideas or feedback, only to be ignored. Feedback is a gift and should be treated with respect no matter how far left field it might be. 

Your power users and most passionate customers will have ideas, and it’s essential for them to feel heard.

Solution: Train support agents to listen carefully to customers. Repeat their feedback to them so they know you understand where they’re coming from. 

When feedback that doesn’t align with company goals is received, explain that and remember to use empathy. Lastly, offer ways to submit feedback, such as surveys or community forums.

When you fail to implement automation or do so poorly

Automation in customer support is critical for building a scalable customer service organization. 

Whether automating responses using AI and chatbots or automating behind-the-scenes workflows to make agents more efficient, automation is a must-have ingredient in modern-day customer service teams. 

Still, many companies are failing to implement automation, or they’re doing it poorly, resulting in more manual work, delayed responses, and less happy customers.

Solution: Deploy automation where it matters most. Fully automated customer support isn’t the answer. The best approach is a combination of automated and human support. 

This is where augmented AI in customer service comes into play—leveraging AI to handle the repetitive tasks and surface the right info, while keeping humans in the loop for complex, emotional, or high-stakes interactions. 

Test automation frequently to ensure workflows are running smoothly and your AI tools are providing relevant, accurate, and empathetic responses.

When you fail to resolve a customer’s problem

Whether it’s a question, technical need, or another service issue, sometimes customer inquiries get lost in the mix due to sloppy processes, ill-equipped and poorly trained agents, or broken escalation paths. 

Solution: Track resolution times on each inquiry and alert management or senior agents about long-running tickets. 

Create escalation paths for senior agents or leadership to handle critical service issues. Measure customer satisfaction to ensure each inquiry is dealt with appropriately.

The Service Recovery Paradox

You can try your hardest to avoid bad customer service experiences, but the truth is, things will go wrong from time to time. 

No matter how well-trained your team is or how many tools and systems you use to provide efficient and effective support, you will drop the ball occasionally and have a disgruntled customer on your hands.

How you react to customer service failures is equally important to avoiding them, and that’s where the service recovery paradox comes in. 

The service recovery paradox is the idea that customers can actually gain trust and loyalty in your brand when you respond to a customer service issue the right way. 

For example, let’s say a restaurant server accidentally spills a glass of wine on you during a fancy date night. 

• Response 1: The server apologizes and brings you a napkin to dry off.
• Response 2: The server expresses empathy and rushes to clean up the mess. They bring in management to comp your meal with a free dessert and send you off with a gift card for another free meal. 

The second response is much more likely to gain a loyal customer due to how they responded with all hands on deck and compensating you for the mishap. 

The lesson here is don’t panic when you’ve created a bad customer service experience. Instead, think about how to respond to the situation to improve it and build a stronger relationship with the impacted customer.

Avoid poor customer experiences to build stronger customer relationships

Customer service mistakes happen, but when they occur so regularly that customers start to lose trust in your company, that’s when you have a real problem. 

Consistently poor customer service damages customer relationships and tarnishes your brand's reputation.

Subpar customer service is often the result of mismanaged priorities from the top down. It takes a leadership team that truly believes in customer service as a growth engine to build a world-class customer support team. 

But with the right people, processes, and systems, you can build a customer service team your customers will love. 

If you’re looking to improve your customer service, lighten your team’s load, or find a more human-centered way to scale, you’re not alone. 

Learn more about PartnerHero’s Augmented AI service.

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