How to Handle Customer Complaints and Earn More Trust

If nobody is complaining about your business, you’re just not reaching enough people yet. Complaints are inevitable, and they cannot (and should not) be avoided. They must be heard and handled. 

The service recovery paradox is proof that a well-handled complaint can result in greater trust than if the customer never had a problem to begin with. With that in mind, let’s explore how to build a team, or a company, that consistently and effectively handles customer complaints.

The many flavors of customer complaints

Complaints are typically an expression of dissatisfaction, but they can come in many different forms and should not all be treated in exactly the same way. Here are some of the most common forms of customer complaints:

• Genuine problems that need fixing: Something has gone wrong, something is broken, or a mistake has been made, and it needs to be acknowledged, assessed, and resolved.

• Confused customers or incorrect assumptions: The customer is genuinely upset, but it stems from confusion about something they read or assumed about your product or service. They need to be gently informed and assisted toward their goal.

• There’s a mismatch between what you offer and what the customer needs: You delivered your offering successfully, but the customer actually needs something else and is unhappy. They should be the customer of another company, but you can be kind and helpful through that transition.

• Questions of taste, not craft: Sometimes, people just won’t like the way your product works or your service is offered. Their tastes are different than yours, and that’s okay. It’s valid feedback that you might not choose to act on. In contrast, feedback about your craft — the actual work product — might be more critical to handle. See Ira Glass’s The Gap for more on taste and craft.

• The customer had a bad day: There’s something else going on in their lives, and you’re just the first convenient place to unleash those feelings. You don’t need to take abuse, and it’s okay to just let those wash by if there’s really nothing you can act on.

Identifying which type (or which combination of types) you’re dealing with should inform your response. One useful method to draw out enough detail is Socratic questioning, which can help you get to the source of the issue. For example, you might ask your customer questions like:

• What do you mean by…?

• Could you provide an example?

• Could you expand on that point further?

And ask yourself questions like:

• What other information do I need?

• What am I assuming here?

• Why is this complaint important?

With a few questions, you should have enough information to know how to shape your response to the customer — and also your internal actions. Every team should have a complaint-handling process that guides customer-facing staff through those tricky moments.

Define your complaint-handling process

Complaints can be emotionally fraught, and it’s easy to get a little flustered and lose track of a conversation. Create your own internal process that anyone on your team can refer to using these steps as a base model.

Listen closely, and acknowledge quickly 

In your support queue triage process, make sure you identify complaints early and let those customers know that you’re listening. You don’t have to have the answers yet; just knowing that you want to respond thoughtfully is important to them. When you identify urgent complaints, bump their priority up for the team to resolve first.

Understand the full picture 

Take a beat before replying to make use of all the contextual information you have access to: the customer's prior history with support tickets, other customers facing the same issue, their account type or purchase history. Read between the lines of their complaint, and then ask follow-up questions to draw out a fuller picture. 

Take appropriate action 

Decide what (if anything) needs to be done in response to this complaint. Is there a technical resolution to be made? It should be tested and confirmed. Perhaps an offer of refund or restitution is needed? Does an apology need to be written? 

Beyond the customer-facing actions, you might need to escalate an issue to a leader or another department for them to take action on. Make sure your process covers how to tag or categorize issues so they can be monitored while that happens, and so that insights drawn from customer complaints can inform decisions made elsewhere in the company.

Resolve and respond 

Now it's time to close the loop with the customer. Lead with humility; if a mistake was made, acknowledge it again and apologize as appropriate. Next, set the right workflows in place to follow up and confirm that any promised actions have been taken at the appropriate time.

Your process should be customized to your own team. Use role names (i.e., “notify the Head of Marketing”) or individual names to make it clear when specific people should be tagged into the process. 

Include guidelines for when to escalate a complaint up the ladder (e.g., when it involves a client with an account manager) and how to make that escalation. 

No process is going to be perfectly applicable in every scenario, but having a baseline to work from will help keep your whole team on track.

The trick, of course, is to actually use the process in the moment. 

Complaint resolution in practice

Effective complaint handling is more often the outcome of a well designed system than of individual brilliance on behalf of the support team — and we’ll get into building those systems below — but under business pressure mistakes are made, and those are the stories you’ll hear about. 

For instance, in December of 2024, the Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC) released a report on 11 general insurers and how they handle complaints. They outlined the recurring reasons that insurers failed to handle complaints well:

• Failure to identify complaints — Not triggering their complaint management process at all because they never identified the complaint. In this case, insurers failed to identify one in six customer complaints!

• Failure to identify systemic issues — Not recognizing that many complaints stemmed from an internal issue that could be corrected at a higher level in the company.

• System constraints and data — Not having effective systems for handling and reporting on complaints (and the actions taken to resolve them).

• Communication failures — Providing inadequate, incorrect, or delayed explanations to customers.

It’s much easier to recall times when customer support got it wrong than it is to think of great moments of complaint handling. Moments of quiet competence don’t go viral, or indeed end up in a museum ~4,000 years later:

So instead of inspirational examples of complaints that were resolved behind the scenes with a minimum of drama, refer to our example responses for tricky situations.

Each example walks you through not only a sample answer, but also why those words were chosen and other ways the situation might be handled. You can adapt those to create your own example situations.

Building a team that manages complaints well

As seen in the insurance industry report above, having a complaints process is not enough to ensure consistently effective handling of complaints. Company leaders and managers, whether or not they are customer-facing, are responsible for creating an environment in which customer complaints are heard, understood, and acted on. If that’s your role, then here is some practical guidance to get you started.

Give them the authority to take action 

Do everything you can to allow your customer support agents to take the appropriate action without having to pass the customer up the chain. Enable them with both the tools to take actions and the permission to make guided judgement calls on, for example, offering extensions or refunds.

Set boundaries, not rigid policies 

Rather than give support staff strict policies to follow when responding to customers, give them broader boundaries and allow them flexibility within those boundaries. 

For example, a document which suggests five different options to consider for a customer who is demanding a refund will result in better service than a single policy that is required to be applied in every situation.

Build in “slack” time to ask further questions 

If your team is constantly under pressure to resolve tickets quickly, they are less likely to take the time to listen with empathy, ask follow up questions, and gather a more nuanced understanding of the issue. 

Make sure they have the time and the permission to really look after an upset customer by operating your team with sufficient slack. That might mean modifying your hiring plans, sharing out workloads, or adjusting response times.

Train employees to make good judgement calls 

If you want people to make consistently good judgment calls, provide them with opportunities to learn from the calls of others through sample answers and scenarios. Give them guidance they can apply to help them make a decision, and they’ll build up their skills over time. Think playbooks, not scripts.

Create a safe environment 

Dealing with angry or upset people is stressful, and it can be hard for customer-centric support staff to deal with them consistently and fairly. People who feel psychologically safe will have a lot more emotional energy left to care for your customers. 

Make sure your staff know how you want to handle abusive customers, and that you have their back if they apply those guidelines but things still turn out badly. 

Have tools in place to capture insights 

Speak to the relevant departments in your own company about where and how they would like to see customer feedback, and build a system that links in to those places. 

For example, Help Scout’s own team has integrations between Help Scout and Linear that make it quick and easy to collect feature requests, bug reports, and recurring complaints in a place where product, design, and engineering teams can easily access and report on them. 

Create a system for following up on complaints 

Did the action that was promised to the customer (a refund, an extension on their subscription, a replacement product) actually get delivered? Add workflows or tags that can report on follow-up actions and confirm it.

Complaints are a gift

More specifically: Complaints are the kind of gift that is necessary and useful, even if not particularly exciting in the moment. Complaints are the pants and socks of the customer support world. 

If your customers stop complaining, it’s because they no longer care enough to tell you what they are having trouble with. So even though it can be very tough to handle an upset customer, with some good systems, a clear process, and internal support, customer complaints can be a source of both internal insight and external satisfaction.