Turning Negative Feedback into Positive Change for your Customer Support Team

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“Negative feedback can make us bitter or better,” says Robin Sharma, a global leadership expert and author. Most people have a knee jerk reaction to negative feedback, which is to either defend against it or deflect it. But negative feedback can be a crucial tool for improvement, especially in business. Simply put: without negative feedback from customers, businesses don’t gain a valuable perspective on how to competitively evolve. 

The trick is running a customer support team that is not only equipped to receive negative feedback but to turn that feedback into action that results in continuous improvement. 

Here, we explore how customer support teams can productively take in, understand, address, and leverage negative feedback to strengthen the entire business. 

Understanding the Value of Negative Feedback

According to Areen Shahbari, CEO of Shahbari Training & Consultancy and instructor of several Harvard Professional & Executive Development leadership courses, feedback should be viewed as a learning experience.1

A business can only do so much internally to analyse areas for improvement. It needs external voices — customers — to provide true insight into what to do better. Embracing negative feedback from your customers allows you to take steps toward meaningful change based on real information from the people who buy from you. This concept should be at the core of your support team’s approach to customer service. 

Negative feedback also gives your support team opportunities to strengthen its ability to listen, comprehend, acknowledge, and act on important data. Below, we offer guidance on how to help your teams develop an effective approach to negative feedback.

Identifying the Core Issues in Negative Feedback

Ideally, if feedback has to be negative, customer support teams receive it in a clear and constructive way — backed by examples. In reality, this is rarely the case. Customers aren’t usually calling in with a plan of how to deliver their feedback in the most useful way. It’s up to the support team to sift through information from the customer to identify the core issue of the complaint. 

For example, if a customer calls in to say that their product arrived in red instead of yellow, the core issue may not be about the colour discrepancy. It may be that the business’s website was confusing to navigate to ensure the correct colour was easy to choose. Or perhaps that there was a mix-up in shipping after the customer purchased the yellow item. It’s important for support representatives to distinguish between what the customer has seemingly called in about and what the underlying problem is.  

Once the representative is able to identify the core problem, they can use technology to categorise the feedback in a CRM solution via tags. Tagging this data allows the business to analyse feedback trends over time to spot areas for improvement and to track progress. Using a customer communication and intelligence platform like Aircall — integrated with a CRM tool — gives support teams the ability to seamlessly connect customer feedback to analytics and tagging systems. 

Creating an Action Plan From Customer Complaints

With negative feedback properly categorised, teams can then prioritise issues and set realistic goals for resolution. Here’s what an action plan might look like for your business:

1. Collect all relevant negative feedback from your various communication channels to consolidate the data. If you use a platform like Aircall, you can pull up a view of omnichannel communication and related threads quickly and easily.

2. Analyse the feedback to identify recurring issues across categories like customer segments, regions, products, and more.

3. Rank issues based on their impact on both your customer base and your business operations as a whole. High-priority issues will be ones that directly affect your bottom line and customer loyalty.

4. Designate time and effort to outline remediation steps, including who is responsible for each step and how long it will take to make progress.

5. Establish measurable goals and metrics that you’ll use to measure the success of your remediation efforts.

6. Share the remediation plan with all relevant agents, supervisors, managers, and leaders.

7. Revisit the plan as needed to make adjustments based on continued monitoring and analytics. 

Training Your Team to Handle Negative Feedback Constructively

It’s not an inherent human trait to respond positively to negative feedback — this comes with training. There are several training tools and methods for enabling your customer support team to receive feedback in a constructive manner:

• Empathy training, which involves active listening and using empathy-driven language, helps agents listen to customers’ concerns without interrupting and show understanding of the customers’ feelings. 

• Communication technique training empowers staff to use positive language, calm tones, and clarifying phrases to make customers feel heard and acknowledged while addressing the core issues.

• De-escalation technique training is important for agents to have in their arsenal of skills in case customers are hostile, accusatory, or irrational.

• Cultural sensitivity and awareness training gives representatives a stronger ability to bring respect to each interaction. 

• Role-playing and simulations are valuable for putting these skills into practice. They give agents the chance to practice saying certain phrases out loud, think on their feet in a difficult situation, flag for help, and de-escalate as needed.

Implementing Feedback-Driven Changes in Your Support Processes

Once you’ve got your action plan and a trained team, it’s time to introduce and integrate changes into your support workflows to enact your remediation strategies. Consider the following framework for implementing and managing change:

• Map out new workflows in visual format using flowcharts, software, or other tools. Visualisation software helps all relevant parties see how new workflows compare to old ones, where changes enter at each turn, and how each step is defined. 

• Leverage technology like your communication platform and CRM solution to help you implement changes across your support department. This is your opportunity to see where you might introduce automation into your workflows to boost productivity. Aircall helps your customer support team improve efficiency by automating certain tasks like call logging and setting follow-up reminders. 

• Monitor performance closely once your teams enact new workflows. Aircall’s analytics tools give supervisors the ability to track agent performance, keep up on response times and resolution rates, and make real-time decisions about tweaking strategies based on data. 

Communicating Changes to Your Customers

Don’t forget to let your customers know of any changes you implement that would affect their experiences. In the colour discrepancy example, perhaps your business realises it needs to overhaul its UX to make it easier for customers to choose the correct product colours. If you decide to make significant changes to your website as a result, it’s a good idea to inform customers before you do. Sending out emails to your subscribers allows you to explain why you’re making the change. 

Taking this communication step also gives you an opportunity to show customers that you hear and take in their feedback — demonstrating that you value their opinions.

Leveraging Aircall for Continuous Improvement

Aircall’s customer communication and intelligence platform helps customer support teams tackle the negative feedback challenge in the following ways: 

Gain a Holistic View of the Customer Experience (the Good and the Bad)

The platform gathers data on customer feedback and integrates it across other tools such as CRM solutions to give teams a 360° view of the customer. Aircall’s dashboard presents data in a clear, digestible way — enabling teams to sort and retrieve information on various feedback categories easily and quickly. 

Stay Proactive About Customer Concerns

Real-time analytics identify patterns and predict trends to enable teams to act on customer feedback proactively. Aircall’s intelligence-gathering and analysing capability helps teams develop stronger responses to trending issues. For example, if your team is able to identify recurring issues using call recording and analytics features, they can develop strategies for responding to these issues when customers call and remain better prepared for these conversations. 

Coach a Stronger Support Force

Aircall AI helps managers coach teams by summarising conversations and pulling out the most actionable insights. The Trending Topics dashboard shows managers how customers and teams talk about certain topics so they can tailor coaching accordingly. 

How Puls Revolutionised Customer Engagement With Aircall 

Puls, a software platform connecting homeowners with handyman and repair services, knew that it needed a sophisticated, easy-to-use communication platform to improve customer-facing interactions. The company had three different phone systems when it chose Aircall to streamline its customer support responsiveness. 

With Aircall AI, Puls was able to:

• Drastically reduce time spent on call reviews by auto-generating call summaries and key conversation topics

• Deliver valuable insights to team members about customer interactions

• Leverage sentiment analysis to understand and monitor quality of customer support and identify areas for improvement

• Tailor customer support strategies to proactively address customer needs and provide exceptional support every time 

Turn Negative Feedback Into Positive Change With Aircall 

With the right technology, customer support teams can view negative feedback as a vital opportunity for growth. Every business strives to continuously improve, and negative feedback is an essential building block of that mission. Aircall's inbound call centre solutions help support teams fulfill their improvement goals, maintain high customer support standards, meet evolving success metrics, and stay one step ahead of customer expectations.

Book a demo to learn more about Aircall's call centre software today!

Sources:

1. Parsons L. How to Give Negative Feedback to Employees. Professional Development | Harvard DCE. Published June 23, 2022. https://professional.dce.harvard.edu/blog/how-to-give-negative-feedback-to-employees/

Published on October 16, 2024.