Learning From Mistakes: 6 Examples of Bad Customer Service and How to Avoid Them

Poor customer service costs businesses about $62 million a year. This number may be frightening, but it should not be too surprising, as a lot of customers are ready to churn after a single bad experience. 

How can we describe what poor service is? When a business falls short in providing quality assistance, timely responses, or satisfying overall customer experience, it can be classified as an example of bad customer service.

Poor Customer Service: Consequences

The idea of everyone expecting good service seems obvious enough. But here’s what we see if we illustrate it: 52% of customers leave and switch to competitors after a single bad experience. 

Even if a business doesn’t receive complaints or negative reviews, this doesn’t mean everything is ok. About 91% of dissatisfied customers simply never return, without pointing out the company’s mistake. And, as if that’s not bad enough already — most of them share their poor experience with 9–15 people. 

Insufficient customer service can damage the company’s reputation, cause customers to seek out other options, and ultimately result in lost revenue. But how do we define a bad service and turn it into a good one? Let’s explore it.

6 Examples of Bad Customer Service

All of us have our ideas of what good customer service is, but what makes it objectively bad? Everyone who knows examples of poor customer service from their own experience can offer some explanations that lie on the surface:

• Unavailability of customer support
• Support representatives being rude or disrespectful
• The solution proposed turns out to be useless

But customers can be disappointed for less obvious reasons, so let’s take a look at them.

Here are some of the most remarkable examples of bad customer service, when a customer support team, or a company in general, instead of resolving customers’ issues, makes things even worse.

Providing No Opportunity to Talk to a Live Person

Being unable to get to a human support representative is the most irritating factor and number one of the examples of bad customer service for 75% of people. Some companies intentionally hide their contacts, making them so hard to find that customers just give up on receiving any help. Others rely on chatbots or phone menus with pre-recorded instructions so heavily that their customers can hardly ever get to talk to a human support consultant. 

While businesses might like to decrease the number of support calls, especially the ones with standard and simple requests, the border between optimizing your workflow and disregarding your customers’ needs can be pretty thin. To avoid the latter, a company needs to invest in its customer support and have enough human representatives to be actually able to cover incoming requests. 

Another method of decreasing an agent’s workflow is creating solid self-service options. With a sustainable knowledge base or FAQ page, a lot of customers with simple questions would be eager to find solutions themselves. 

Not Offering Omnichannel Support

The number of platforms customers want to use to communicate with businesses grows every week. Not providing a customer the possibility to contact a company through their channel of choice means giving them a good reason to switch to a competitor.

In 2023, omnichannel support is a must. 73% of consumers already use different channels along their buying journey, and brands need to be present where customers expect them. 

Of course, making support agents constantly switch between emails, DM’s, and WhatsApp messages is not an option. The number of channels can quickly become overwhelming, and customer requests may end up ignored. The best solution would be to integrate all the communication channels into the CRM system, gathering all requests in one place and ensuring nothing gets lost. This instrument also lets us have all the previous communication history at hand so that each representative can pick up a conversation smoothly at any time. It is essential, as customers often switch from one channel to another but still expect a seamless experience, as no one likes explaining the same situation multiple times. 

Keeping Customers on Hold for Too Long

There was a time when most people found waiting on hold for more than 5 minutes unacceptable. Now, 60% of customers say waiting for even one minute is too long. Slow responses are one of the most irritating examples of bad customer service, and even if they have called with a small issue, it can become a major problem after minutes spent on hold. 

If we know that customers have to wait for the response for too long, the team may require expansion. First, pay attention to quality assurance information and analyze how much you need extra hands. If the team regularly struggles with the number of customer inquiries, it is a clear sign that our team is understaffed. If hiring more support specialists doesn’t fit into the budget that easily, or a company just requires additional help during the holiday season only, it is worth considering an outsourcing option.

If a company doesn’t have an opportunity to get extra hands for the busiest hours, there is a solution that can be applied quickly. The callback option is always a choice to make the waiting process more comfortable for our customers. Customers are much more patient if they are expecting a callback than when they are waiting in a queue, especially if they have the option to schedule a comfortable callback time themselves. 

Not Taking Responsibility

The biggest mistake businesses can make regarding customer experience is to believe that once the purchase is made, they can relax and not be concerned about anything else. To avoid this mistake, we should obtain a customer-centric perspective and realize their journey begins long before the purchase and ends much later after it. Shifting the blame on contractors, delivery, Internet providers, or even customers themselves are some of the most disappointing examples of bad customer service. Customers want businesses to take responsibility for the results and to find a solution, or better — prevent any upcoming issues.

We should always remember that companies don’t care about our business arrangements, workflow, policies, etc. And they do not need to be. What they need is a smooth buying and using experience, which we are expected to provide. Also, we should know that not all customers express their concerns before everything goes wrong and their satisfaction drops. The solution here is proactivity. Our team should ask questions, clarify details, and reach out to customers after the purchase to ensure they are satisfied. Their own opinions on how a product or service can be improved are precious, as they come from communication with customers, and we need to take them into account. And if things do go wrong and a customer is disappointed — our team needs to know how to apologize, as it is also a part of taking responsibility. 

Transferring Calls Multiple Times

Another one of the most disturbing examples of bad customer service for customers is being transferred from one agent to another without actually getting help. This does not only give them a feeling that a consultant doesn’t know what they are doing but that the whole company structure needs changes. 

If a support representative can’t resolve an issue themselves, there should be a good reason. First and most obvious — they may need additional training. If the consultant is simply not empowered to make decisions — there is an issue on the company’s side. We need to ensure the customer-facing team can help customers at once and offer them a solution. 

If a customer’s request is too complex or specific and needs to be scaled to a superior or to another department, the consultant should know exactly that a person they transfer the call to will be able to help. 

Demonstrating a Lack of Empathy

When customers have issues with a product or service, they expect a customer support agent to be on their side. The last thing they want to hear is a bland, scripted answer pronounced by a support representative who simply doesn’t care. In customer service, good and bad examples of an agent’s attitude to customers are often distinguished by an empathetic approach.

Empathy — is a key to good customer service and a core factor in building strong customer relationships. Even if an agent can’t resolve an issue or do it the way a customer wants, an empathetic support representative can still create a positive impression. They give the customer a feeling that they are heard and understood, and that their issues actually matter. And if customers feel indifference, hear no apologies, and notice no admissions of responsibility, it is a good reason for them to hang up and, most likely — never return again. 

To avoid this mistake, we can pay attention to our quality assurance and evaluate how engaging and emotionally responsive our support representatives are. If they need some guidance — we can offer them empathy training, and we should always emphasize the importance of looking at every request from the customers’ point of view. 

How to Avoid Bad Customer Service: SupportYourApp’s Experience

The examples of good and bad customer service teach us that simply giving customer support consultants basic training at the very beginning is not enough to expect consistent quality. Over the years, we at SupportYourApp have established some ground rules that help us provide top-notch service quality.

1. Hire the right people. Our HR Specialists thoroughly pick out talented candidates for each project to ensure our consultants have communication proficiency and all the necessary skills for providing the best services.
2. Monitor quality. Perfect service requires constant quality assurance. To make it effective, we define metrics we need to focus on for achieving customer success. 
3. Make training an ongoing process. Our consultants pass intensive training before joining the project, polishing their communication skills, and studying the product they will support. After that, they also take part in regular training courses, developed by our Learning&Development Department, to obtain and improve their hard and soft skills. 

Consistent service quality requires a systematic approach, and we need to develop a solid strategy for providing customers with the best experience on a daily basis. If you feel you could use third-party expertise to create a customer support strategy for your own business, you can always contact us.

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