How to Understand Customer Frustration and Respond to Them
When customers reach out to support, they are already frustrated or angry with the product. If they aren’t already, they are on the precipice and ready to jump headlong into the abyss of anger with your company and the person representing it: your customer service representative. It’s never nice to be on the receiving end of frustration or anger, but it’s also totally understandable why your customer might be upset: they’ve had to reach out to you for help with something that should just be easy to use and work as expected “right out of the box.” Understanding why a customer is frustrated can help you move a bit more quickly to the ‘how to’ fix the situation and repair the broken trust. So, what causes frustration in customers, how do we commonly react to it, and how can we fix it? Let’s find out!
What is Frustration and What Causes It?
The dictionary definition of frustration is “the feeling of being upset or annoyed, especially because of inability to change or achieve something.” Surely, if you think about it, there are a number of things in support that could cause this: not being able to find something, something being broken, something not working as expected, or a product being something entirely different than expected. The customer has no control and is unable to do anything about the situation except for reaching out to support. They are powerless. This generates the frustration which so frequently starts support interactions on the wrong foot. Here are some of the most common ways this happens:
#1 Misunderstanding Documentation
When someone looks at your customer support documentation, they do so with the hope that they will be able to help themselves and not have to actually talk to your support team to get an understanding of what’s going on. There are three things that can happen when a customer reads your documentation:
1. They can find the answer that they are looking for and be able to move on with their day without an issue. Yay!
2. They can misinterpret your documentation, try whatever they think it’s telling them to do, create problems and then get frustrated and need to contact support.
3. They can’t find the documentation that they are looking for, either because it exists but don’t know what to look for, or it doesn’t exist at all. These customers also have to contact support.
Two-thirds of all documentation-searches result in frustration and contacting support. Yikes! To avoid frustrating customers that can’t find the documentation they need, do frequent knowledge base audits. Check for common search terms and make sure the right article turns up. Ask customers if they had a chance to look through the documentation before contacting you and see if anything needs to be updated.
#2 Not Being Able to Find What They Need
Along with not being able to find something in the documentation, people often struggle with finding something in the product, especially if it is a complicated one. This is especially frustrating for people, because often when people don’t know something that they perceive as being “easy”, they feel stupid for not knowing it. So, if someone can’t find something in your product and needs to email support to ask about it, they are already on the edge because they feel incapable. This is a case where good documentation could save the day, as long as they are able to find what they are looking for.
#3 Being Given the Wrong Information in an Interaction
If a customer is given a wrong piece of information in a support interaction, it’s like applying salt to an open wound. They’ve already had to take the step of reaching out to support, which frustrates most customers, but now they have to reach out again because your team made a mistake. Occasionally, a customer will be able to find the correct answer by looking around where they’ve been directed, but for the most part, they have to start the support process all over again and be redirected. It makes sense, then, that the level of frustration they feel with your support team is doubled, and the amount of trust that they have is halved. While it’s understandable to have slip-ups occasionally, move cautiously when talking to customers, and double check your information before you send it out to avoid unnecessary frustration.
#4 Being Bounced from Channel to Channel
Have you ever had an interaction with customer service where you started off in an email, and then they suggested that you call, and then you were given a different number to call and, in the end, you never got your situation resolved? That happens all the time and even has a name: channel switching. You probably also had to give the same information to the customer service representatives over and over again, and repeat the same story multiple times. That is the definition of frustration, and we’ve all felt it.
To reduce the frustration from channel switching, consider upgrading your support strategy to omnichannel support. Your customers receive a better experience if they need to be shifted between channels because agents can see additional context across channels and conversations – making it much easier to solve the problem.
How Do We React to Frustration?
When people get frustrated with us, it can be hard to bear. This is especially true for support people who thrive on empathy and emotion and want nothing more than to solve the customer’s issue. The two primary ways that we as support agents react to frustrated customers are resentment and a loss of willingness to help. We’ll often look at a frustrated customer’s email and roll our eyes or maybe even respond in a way that is less friendly than it could be.
Instead, we need to change our perspective, so we can continue to do our job and reduce the customer’s frustration. Two things to try are— taking a break from the ticket, or attempting to feel gratitude for the customer. Taking a break can be anything from moving past that ticket and coming to it later, or actually getting up from your desk and going for a walk outside. Additional perspective can calm us down and get us back into a good mental state. Remember: your customers are people just like you, and you don’t know what’s happening to them outside of the support interaction either.
The Service Recovery Paradox
If you do frustrate your customers, guess what? It’s okay! There is something called the service recovery paradox, a term originally coined by Sundar Bharadwaj and Michael McCollough. Basically, what it says is: if a service problem happens and a customer is frustrated but you get back to them quickly and with a good answer, their satisfaction with the product is actually higher than someone who never had an issue at all. So, even if someone does come to you frustrated and angry, if you work hard to resolve their issue, they’ll end up loving you even more than they would have before.
Measure your customer’s experience and how much work they have to put in for a resolution, and you’ll be able to better understand how frequently you are hitting this paradox. A great measurement for frustration is the Customer Effort Score. This tells you how much work a customer had to put in, whether it be searching in your documentation or in back-and-forths with your support team before they were able to get their answer resolved.
Conclusion
Frustration is a totally normal feeling that everyone from CEOs to entry-level interns experience. Your customers feeling it, as they reach out to you, is also to be expected. You can’t stop it, so you might as well understand it! Knowing how to solve for and measure the effort that your customers are putting before getting the query resolved is half the battle. So, pay attention to Customer Effort Score, make note of where your customers are coming from, and pay attention to your agent’s demeanor as they are responding to make sure you get as many customers cruising on the upswing of the service recovery paradox bell curve as possible.
