According to Microsoft’s State Of Customer Service Report, 90% of consumers consider good customer service when choosing a brand, and 58% say they will switch to competitors if their former brand fails to meet up.

Without a doubt, customer service has become a brand differentiator.

Moreover, 55% of respondents in the same report also expect a year-on-year (YoY) increase in better service delivery. This implies customer support can no longer play a backseat role, especially in 2025, and you need to double down on your investments.

However, providing prompt and purposeful customer service has its ups and downs. In this article, we’ll discuss these challenges and offer proven solutions to tackle them.

Top 10 customer service challenges you must tackle

A typical customer service workflow consists of several touchpoints, ranging from customer inquiry and ticket creation to ticket closure and follow-up. 

Along these, several challenges often pop up. Take, for example, slow response times and dissatisfied customers, which can disrupt your delivery. In fact, as we noted above, this invariably risks losing out loyal customers to your competitors. 

So, what exactly do the challenges imply, and how do you handle them? Let’s take a look:

1. Slow response times

Hubspot’s survey report shows that 90% of consumers consider immediate response very important, and 60% define “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. The longer it takes to respond, the more likely your customers are to seek other alternatives.

Solution

• Implement chatbots for instant responses: Use smart chatbots to quickly handle L1 requests and escalate only complex issues to your agents.
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  As an omnichannel customer service platform with several AI-powered features, Plivo CX offers an OpenAI-powered self-service chatbot capable of reducing your response time to a negligible fraction and boosting customer experience.

• Monitor response times with real-time analytics. Assess metrics like time to first response and overall time to resolution. Review each touch point in your workflow to determine which part is taking longer to complete and optimize accordingly.

2. Lack of personalization

The latest Salesforce research report highlights an increase in the number of customers who feel treated like unique individuals from 39% in 2023 to 73% in 2024.

 While that’s good news, approximately 27% still feel like they are being treated as numbers. Such customers feel frustrated and are not likely to become loyal to your brand.

Solution

• Integrate data for personalized delivery: Collate customer data into CRM software and integrate with communication tools to eliminate data silo. 
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  Plivo CX simplifies this process by providing a unified agent desktop that presents a granular view of customer issues and previous communications. This allows customer service agents to tap into necessary information for personalized support right from a single dashboard without needing to switch channels.

• Train customer service agents: They should pay attention to cultural and language barriers when communicating. Also, equip your team with essential soft communication skills to make your customers feel valued at every point of interaction.

3. Handling multiple customers

As your business scales, the number of customer queries you handle daily also increases. However, this can expose your customer service workflow to errors, such as losing track of unresolved queries, unsatisfactory resolution, inappropriate rerouting, ticket collision, and prolonged time to resolution.

Solution

• Implement ticketing system: Use a ticketing system to consolidate all customer queries on one platform. This enables you to track each ticket efficiently, prioritize, and minimize ticket collision.
• Use AI-powered chatbot and routing software: Integrate chatbots to handle basic and common requests in order to free up your agents for other core tasks.
  For example, Plivo CX’s OpenAI-powered chatbot, trained on company datasets, helps resolve simple queries quickly. Also, it automatically escalates complex and nuanced issues to human agents, along with detailed notes and summaries.
• Expand support team: AI bots are powerful, but you shouldn’t leave them to do the heavy lifting. If necessary, acquire a few more agents with the needed expertise to boost response time and reduce the workload on other team members.

4. Answering challenging questions

Let’s face it: There are times you’ll receive some queries that are unscripted and out of the playbook. In such situations, you can’t possibly turn your customers away or tell them you have no answer.

Solution

• Offer a callback: If it’s a phone call, ask customers to give you a minute while you gather more information on their queries. This doesn’t reduce your professionalism but instead assures customers that you’re deeply concerned about them. 
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  With Plivo CX, optimize call routing by leveraging customer data to connect callers with the right agents, and improve customer experience with a convenient callback option.

• Escalate to senior agents: Different customer complaints require different levels of expertise. Ensure your agents have the tools and orientation necessary to escalate queries without delay. 
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  You can also use Plivo CX’s call whisper feature to coach your agents live on the phone without the customer's knowledge.

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5. Handling dissatisfied customers

Sometimes, getting complaints from annoyed customers is unavoidable, even if you provide the best services. What matters is how you respond. Not handling situations like this appropriately can damage your business reputation, especially since most customers will escalate the issue to social media for visibility.

Solution

• Apply H.E.A.R.D: The HEARD (Hear, Empathize, Apologize, Resolve, and Diagnose) approach focuses on empathizing with your customers and acknowledging the error. This helps diffuse the situation and preserve customer relationships. Once you’ve resolved the issue, immediately figure out why it happened and proactively prevent its recurrence.
• Provide updates on resolution: Keep your customers informed about the resolution process, progress, and possible challenges. This will get them involved and let them know you’re not slacking off.
• Offer a freebie after resolution: Appeal to their emotions with a discount, free subscription, or a limited-time offer. This ensures the resolution ends on a good note and boosts your chances of retention regardless of what has happened before.
• Escalate when appropriate: If all the options above are ineffective, bring in a senior person by hierarchy. In such cases, customers are more likely to listen if they communicate with someone whose words hold more authority than a frontline customer support agent.

6. Managing service outages

A number of factors, like hardware failures, software bugs, network issues, cyberattacks, or human error, cause service outages, which can upset your customer service workflow.

While not a common situation, a single occurrence can result in tons of angry and frustrated customers overwhelming your support, whether on social media or on calls.

Solution

• Proactive communication: When the light’s off, your customers need to know what’s going on even before they reach out. Let them know what has happened, why it’s happening, and what you’re doing to resolve it while assuring them accordingly. You must also communicate time-to-resolution and empathize genuinely with them to avoid unpalatable outcomes.

Plivo CX’s proactive service excels in situations like these to reduce your inbound requests and manage crises before they escalate.

• Develop a crisis management plan: A crisis management plan outlines the steps your agents should take to resolve each outage systematically. It includes a playbook of responses to use when reaching out to customers, escalation pathways where necessary, and internal communications.
• Compensate losses: Restoring services after an outage does not resolve your customers’ dissatisfaction and anger, especially since they may have suffered a few or large losses. So, develop a compensation plan and communicate it to them after the crisis.

7. Dealing with customer requests that are outside of your offerings

It’s not uncommon to see customers request a feature you don’t offer yet or something totally out of your industry. If the entries are high and align with your vision, that’s a good sign, and you can possibly use it as feedback when upgrading your product library.

But if the requests are not entertainable, whether now or in the near future, it can put your support team in a tight spot.

Solution

• Clearly communicate service boundaries and limitations: Train your agents on your full catalog of offers, including detailed information on future inclusions. They should be able to explain the services you provide comprehensively and help customers understand what you can’t.
• Suggest alternative solutions or third-party services: If a complementary brand provides the requested service, you can refer your customers to them to build a brand-brand relationship. However, you can’t do the same if the other providers are your direct or indirect competitors.
• Sell other offers: While you can’t address exact requests, let customers know about other alternative services you provide and how you can still assist them.
• Deliberate inclusion: Going forward, communicate these requests with the product and development team for inclusion where possible.

8. Providing omnichannel customer support

Customers have different communication preferences, which can lead to a disjointed support delivery if you cannot unify these channels. For instance, Mulesoft’s survey report finds that only 26% of organizations provide a connected experience across all channels, surprisingly leaving a whopping 74% out.

To put it simply, disconnected delivery makes your customers feel like they’re talking to multiple businesses instead of just one when interacting with your support team.

Solution

• Implement omnichannel support tool: Omnichannel support tools centralize your channels and eliminate the need to switch tabs. An example is Plivo CX’s unified desktop agent, which lets your customers conveniently reach out to the contact center via channels such as email, voice, chat, text/SMS and WhatsApp. 

9. Service ticket overload

Ticket overload occurs when the volume of customer queries exceeds the support team's capacity to handle them efficiently, leading to delays and decreased service quality.

Sometimes, it is caused by a growing backlog of queries that have stayed beyond the agreed SLA.

Solution

• Embrace automation: Automation tools like AI-driven chatbots can accurately handle most repetitive customer queries and significantly ease your ticket load. Use ticketing and routing automation programs to stepwise manage each query until it is resolved.
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  To achieve this without resorting to multiple tools, try out Plivo CX’s full-packaged service, which offers all these features and more.

• Build automation workflows: Workflows are predefined instructions your automation should follow from entry to resolution of every query to improve customer service efficiency. 
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  In this case, Plivo CX’s drag-and-drop workflow automation builder allows you to design a custom automation workflow that aligns with your objectives.

10. Choosing the right tools and software

Owing to the shift from brick-and-mortar to digital interactions, there is an increasing need to integrate technology for customer support. However, choosing the right tools from so many different options with varying feature sets can be daunting. In a worst-case scenario, you might end up with a bunch of siloed, inefficient software programs.

Solution

• Assess needs: A customer service team needs an omnichannel support tool, a CRM, a ticketing and routing system, a knowledge base, an analytics tool, and automation software. Review whether your current systems or software of choice are scalable as your needs grow; if not, replace them with modern alternatives.
• Keep the tech stack simple: More is not always better, and too many tools lead to inefficiency, as you need to switch tabs often. To avoid that, use a comprehensive platform like Plivo CX and integrate with CRM like Hubspot to unify data and conversations.

Increase customer satisfaction with Plivo CX

By addressing these common challenges head-on and continuously optimizing your support processes, you can create a customer service experience that not only meets but exceeds expectations, ultimately driving business growth and success.

To help you achieve this, Plivo CX equips customer support teams with a robust omnichannel platform that boasts features and functions such as an OpenAI-powered self-service chatbot, visual workflow builder, inbuilt routing, agent coaching, and a single window pane to unify all communication. 

To learn more, book a demo now!