10 Examples of Poor Customer Experience in SaaS

Have you ever had a poor customer experience? Maybe as simple as a poorly designed user onboarding?

As soon as that poor experience hits, you stop and never return. To win over your customers, you must create excellent customer service that keeps customers returning.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What makes a bad customer experience?
• Ten examples of bad customer service to avoid.
• And eight ways to create an experience that makes users stay.

TL;DR

• A bad customer experience doesn’t meet customer expectations. It includes slow service, a poor customer support team, or complete under-servicing of customer needs.
• Bad customer service affects the customer experience by creating unhappy customers, increasing customer complaints, higher customer churn, and negatively impacting customer loyalty.

The following are examples of how bad customer service can cause poor customer experience:

• No real-time support, such as no chatbot, no self-service options, or long wait times on chat, results in poor customer service.
• The customer service rep’s support quality is poor and doesn’t meet the customer’s expectations.
• Long response times lead to frustration and dissatisfied customers.
• Finding how to reach the customer support team is like navigating through a maze, as it’s unclear.
• When it feels like the customer is just receiving copy-and-paste answers and doesn’t receive any form of personalization.
• Not following up with customers to see if their issues were resolved.
• Not using customer service metrics as feedback to improve customer service and increase retention.
• Disregarding customer feedback and not responding.
• The customer goes through multiple agents before a resolution.

You can improve your customer service to increase customer satisfaction by:

• Letting customers self-serve answers through a resource center reduces customer support tickets.
• Use a chatbot to answer customer questions 24/7.
• Correctly allocate tickets to the right agent by using AI.
• Continue to improve customer service by collecting customer feedback so you know how to improve customer experience.
• Contact customer support reps to find repeated issues, then implement proactive support.
• Use a brand monitoring tool to respond to social media complaints.
• Userpilot can help you improve your customer experience by implementing a resource center, using multiple UI patterns, and collecting customer feedback in-app. Book a demo to find out more!

What is a bad customer experience?

A bad customer experience, often stemming from bad customer service, is a very negative customer interaction with a business where a customer expectation isn’t met.

It includes many factors that contribute to dissatisfaction, frustration, or disappointment on the part of the customer. These factors include subpar quality services, poor service, unhelpful or rude staff, excessive waiting times, and inadequate problem resolution.

Ultimately, a bad customer experience leaves customers feeling undervalued and unimportant, undermining their trust and loyalty toward the business.

How does poor customer service affect customer experience

If your customers suffer from poor customer service, it’s going to impact the customer experience and can result in the following:

• Unhappy customers: If customers are left frustrated after dealing with customer service and don’t have their issues solved, it leads to unhappy customers and an overall poor experience.
• Increase customer complaints: Complaints will likely increase if customers have trouble getting value from your product, especially if they pay. A customer pushed to complain is the essence of a poor experience.
• Higher customer churn rate: When your customers are unhappy with what they get from your product, it will increase the likelihood of churning to find a product that can deliver a better experience.
• Negative impact on customer loyalty: If a customer isn’t getting the service quality they expect, there is no way they’ll be loyal to you and refer people to your product.

Examples of bad customer service that can cause poor customer experience

Bad customer service can create a poor customer experience in many ways. Here are ten examples you must avoid.

#1: Users don’t receive real-time support

A lack of real-time support means the user will likely have to endure long wait times to speak to someone as they don’t have access to a resource center or talk to a chatbot.

If a user has a problem, they want an answer instantly. A slow response hampers their ability to do their job, which creates a bad customer service experience.

Waiting for an answer creates a bad customer experience as they might have to wait hours before continuing their actions. And it wastes the customer’s time when they should be getting value.

#2: The customer service quality doesn’t meet customer expectations

One of the worst things for a customer is to believe that your SaaS will provide excellent customer service whenever they need it. But if the quality doesn’t meet their expectations, leaving is the first thing on their minds.

The mismatch of customer expectations creates bad customer service. In the customer’s mind, they have a bar set for the quality they should receive, indicated by your SaaS’s website, sales team, or the default level they expect.

#3: Long wait times resulting in bad customer service

If the customer support team doesn’t have the correct staffing levels, customers will have to wait for issues they need to resolve.

Customers are paying for your service, so if they have an issue, they expect a resolution when they want. If they have to wait for someone to help them, it creates a poor customer service experience.

Leaving customers to wait for resolution is a bad customer experience because the user wastes time.

#4: Unresolved customer complaints

An unresolved customer complaint is one that a customer has raised, maybe more than once, and has yet to have a response of a resolution or if anyone is looking into it.

It creates bad customer service because the customer has an issue that needs solving, and it’s taking their time to continue chasing a solution.

Whatever issue was raised likely hampers their ability to use your SaaS, creating a bad customer experience as they can’t do what your SaaS said it would deliver.

#5: The customer service team is hard to contact

Contacting the customer service team is hard when there isn’t any visible “contact support” in the resource center or no separate icon leading to instructions on how customers can.

Making it difficult to contact the customer service team means the customer can’t quickly get the help they need.

When the means to contact the customer service team is not easy to find, it creates a terrible customer service experience. The customer gets frustrated and has to spend time trying to discover how to contact the customer service team.

#6: Lack of personalization in responses

A lack of personalization is when a customer receives generic and impersonal responses that feel like they were just copied and pasted to everyone.

These types of responses create bad customer service because it’s likely the response given to the customer only partially answers the issue the customer has.

It leads to a bad customer experience because it makes the customer feel like no one is listening or cares about the issue, as no one is giving the time to respond with a thoughtful and valuable answer.

#7: Not following up on customers to make sure the issue was resolved

Some companies don’t take the time to follow up on customer issues via chat or a modal to ensure the customer service team has correctly resolved the problem.

This lack of follow-up means you aren’t closing the loop with the existing customer and confirming the issue has been solved for them and other potential customers that could run into the same problem.

If your SaaS doesn’t have any follow-up, it can create a bad customer experience because it indirectly demonstrates that the user experience isn’t a top priority.

#8: Not measuring customer service success

Not measuring customer service success means no meaningful thought goes into striving for excellence by monitoring areas and issues that need improving.

The lack of measuring these success metrics means that dissatisfied customers may keep running into the same issues and having the same low-quality service resulting in frustration.

It leads to a bad customer experience because not measuring customer service success can impact team productivity, customer satisfaction, and retention.

#9: Ignoring customer feedback about their experience with an inefficient customer support team

Customers now have 24/7 access due to the internet and more avenues to raise issues. If you have an inefficient customer support team, they could miss these issues on infrequently monitored channels.

If you don’t acknowledge or address the customer issue promptly, it demonstrates poor customer service. When you completely ignore a customer, it makes the customer feel like you don’t care about their feedback or the value of their contribution.

#10: Customer calls are transferred multiple times

Poor handling of calls and not understanding the right person to deal with a customer issue can lead to multiple call transfers.

It creates bad customer service because it makes your company seem inadequate and reduces the trust that a solution to the problem is possible.

When customers call you because they haven’t found an answer to their problem on your website, they are already frustrated. Then, if your customer support team bounces around them, it will further their frustration, pushing them to leave.

How to provide good customer service and increase customer satisfaction and experience

Those examples may seem overwhelming to fix and may kickstart some nightmares, but thankfully there are some ways you can remedy these poor customer services with technology and some changes.

Provide self-service options

When a user runs into a problem, you want to offer them a self-serve option in-app so they can help themselves. Use a resource center to address any issues you think a customer could encounter or speak to the customer service team for common issues.

You can add different modules to your resource center and segment users on their jobs to be done so only relevant information is shown.

All this will help empower the customer to support themselves, reducing your customer support tickets and improving the customer experience.

Make it easy for users to contact your customer service teams

Make it easy for customers to contact you if they have an issue. You can achieve this by adding a “chat with us” button in the user interface where it’s easily visible.

Doing this will help improve the customer experience as it will reduce any friction points customers may encounter when they need to reach out for support.

Use a chatbot to answer FAQs

Chatbots are great because they let you answer customer questions without human intervention. You can take the frequently asked questions highlighted by the customer service team and train a chatbot to respond.

One of the major benefits of a chatbot is that it can answer customer queries 24/7 and isn’t limited to just one customer at a time, so customers aren’t waiting for long periods or for the opening time of the customer service team.

Use NLP to prioritize customer issues

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI that helps interrupt human language to allocate tickets to the right customer service team.

It achieves this by extracting key information from a customer’s request, such as the problem, certain keywords or phrases, and the sense of urgency. It then analyzes this data and categorizes the information to send the ticket to the right person.

The more tickets that get sent to the right person the better the experience for the customer, as they aren’t getting passed around to different people, and the ticket resolution time is lower.

Collect customer feedback after they interact with your customer service team

Collecting customer feedback after interacting with the customer service team will help improve the customer experience.

You can use in-app surveys to monitor how well the customer service team performs and highlight common issues. With this, you can create content so customers can self-serve answers. And train customer service agents who have been getting continuously poor ratings.

Provide proactive customer support to improve customer satisfaction

Talking to your customer services reps can help you uncover some of the major issues users run into to help improve customer satisfaction. Rather than waiting for them to become issues, you should implement proactive support to anticipate and solve problems.

For example, if regular customers have trouble with a certain feature, you can trigger an interactive walkthrough when they use it for the first time.

Use a brand monitoring tool to monitor complaints on social media and react to them

Social media has given users a wider reach to an audience to air their complaints.

Ignoring or being unaware of these complaints can damage your brand reputation and prevent potential users from considering your SaaS.

A brand monitoring tool can help you keep in touch with any brand mentions so you can react to them promptly and show publicly that you want to resolve customer complaints.

Invest in building up your team’s customer service skills

You should continue to educate your customer service reps so they can offer the best customer experience possible.

It could be more training on how to use the product so they better understand what a customer problem could be. It could be training on talking to customers and personalizing responses to display better empathy for their problems. And training on recognizing early when to escalate a ticket to a higher level of support and which tickets to prioritize first.

Improve customer experience with Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform with various features and tools that can help you improve your customer service and experience.

Userpilot can help you with the following:

• Different UI patterns, such as tooltips, driven action, and interactive walkthroughs, can aid you in implementing proactive support.

• You create a code-free resource center so customers can self-serve any issue themselves. Userpilot also lets you segment different modules so customers get relevant modules based on their jobs to be done and can provide different resource formats so you cater to various learning styles.

• Userpilot lets you easily create and trigger in-app surveys to collect customer feedback for any customer service-related reasons and for your SaaS in general.

Conclusion

If your SaaS has a poor customer experience and you’re aware of the fact, you’re signing the death of your SaaS. You must ensure you spend energy making improvements so that when a customer needs help, it is as efficient as possible.

Want to get started with preventing a poor customer experience? Get a Userpilot Demo and start leveraging technology to implement solutions fast.