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5 Examples of Bad Customer Service (and How to Fix Them)
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by
Larry Barker
December 22, 2023
· Updated on
Not long ago, I came across a company whose support team was swamped with tickets.
Their solution to handling the overwhelming volume of customer requests was… particular.
All incoming tickets received outside business hours were automatically closed, with an automatic message asking the customer to contact the customer service team again during business hours.
However, that’s a sure way to a negative experience for your customers, and it reflects horribly on your brand.
Bad customer service is still far more common than it should be, which got us asking: what are some examples of horrible customer service?
Sometimes it’s easiest to learn about what your customer service team should do by taking a look at times when other customer service leaders made the wrong choice. Negative examples, if you will.
So if you’re curious to learn how your business can be customer-centric and consistently deliver excellent customer service, read on to learn more about terrible customer service interactions (and to find tips on how to turn a terrible interaction into a great one).
Bad customer service occurs when a support interaction doesn’t meet a customer's expectations. Excessive delays in responding to an inquiry, rude or unhelpful behavior from customer service representatives, mishandling customer complaints, and not fully resolving a problem are all examples of inadequate customer support.
Obviously, that's a subjective definition. And in some sense, there’s no way around that. Whether an interaction with a customer service rep is good or bad depends on what a customer expects.
But on the other hand, some customer interactions are just flat out bad. Take obscenely long hold times or rude customer service agents, for example.
These things are bad for business, but they happen all the time.
And that’s despite the considerable impact that customer service has on business. 68% of customers will willingly pay more for products from brands known to offer a great customer experience. Great experiences increase revenue, boost retention, and improve customer satisfaction.
Or look at it the other way: 65% of customers have switched to a different brand after a bad experience. Bad customer support increases churn and hurts your bottom line.
That’s why you need a sound customer service strategy — because in today’s competitive landscape, your company can’t afford to offer poor customer service.
Below, we share five common examples of poor customer service and give tips and ideas on how to make them better:
In an ideal world, customers would ask for exactly what they need in terms your support agents can understand.
That’s not what usually happens in a real interaction, though.
Customers explain situations based on their own understanding and how they’re experiencing an issue. They share the symptoms as they see them, and your customer support team has to play the role of a doctor identifying the root cause of their pain.
That’s why learning to ask good questions and read between the lines are key customer service skills.
Here’s an example from a recent support ticket at a bank:
A worried customer contacted her bank’s customer service department. Her card purchases were being declined, despite having a positive balance in her account. She feared her money was blocked or, worse, lost.
In response, the customer service rep shared a knowledge base article about existing limits on the number of card transactions. The article wasn’t exactly wrong — she did exceed the number of transactions — but the agent completely missed the real pain point. The main source of the customer’s concern was whether she’d lost access to her money, and simply offering some reassurance would have transformed the interaction.
Train agents to use critical thinking and ask great questions. That’s how they’ll pick up on what customers need (even when they don’t say it directly). In the interaction above, the bank employee should have addressed the primary concern, reassuring her that the money wasn’t blocked and informing her when the transaction limit would reset.
Other tactical tips to improve in this area include:
Bruce Lee famously encouraged his students to “Be water, my friend.” He recognized the importance of adapting and flexing based on the situation at hand.
Sure, policies and guidelines are there to be followed. They’re crucial in keeping all departments on the same page and ensuring your business operations function smoothly.
But a strict or inflexible process can also be harmful.
Let’s say one of your biggest customers contacts you because they need to make a return, but they happened to miss the deadline by a week. They’ve spent a lot of money with your brand, and they also happen to be an influencer in your industry.
But their phone call gets routed to a new support rep, and they opt to follow the return policy by the book, explaining that the customer is ineligible for a refund. That puts the customer in an awkward spot — they can push for an exception, they can share about the bad experience, or they can suffer in silence.
A knowledgeable agent will know that keeping this particular customer happy is more important than following the standard process.
Empower your frontline staff. Knowledgeable customer service reps can recognize outdated processes that no longer serve the business. They can also identify situations that are the exception to the rule.
Other ideas to help here include:
Frontline staff should never demean customers or display brash or sarcastic attitudes. The same goes for showing apathy or simply displaying no interest in solving a customer’s issues.
Unfortunately, it happens.
A full 73% of customers surveyed by chatbot and AI solution provider, Netomi, reported being on the receiving end of rudeness from a customer service agent.
This actually happened to me personally, very recently. My wife ordered a new area rug online. It ended up being the wrong size, so she initiated a return. The rug was so large that it needed to be picked up by a third-party logistics service, and she waited two weeks to hear from them.
Silence.
After calling the logistics service, she was told there was no record of her request. So she tried again, and after several more days of silence, she called back the company she’d purchased from.
The customer service rep gave her the runaround, ultimately telling her that it was her fault the return had stalled out so long because she had waited too long — even though it was their system that failed to notify the logistics service of the request.
The moment a customer takes the time to contact your support team, they’re already frustrated. Opening the conversation with empathy and communicating a willingness to resolve their problem goes a long way.
To help with this:
Long wait times are a classic example of subpar customer support. They’re a great way to create frustrated customers and build a negative brand reputation.
If you’re curious how it plays out, there are entire Reddit threads about how long consumers have waited on hold.
You’ll read about a customer trying to cancel their phone company and waiting 85 minutes on the phone. Or the 42 minutes it took to book a doctor's appointment.
That’s about 84 minutes and 41 minutes longer than customers should be waiting.
An excessive response time is only made worse by having to repeat yourself multiple times across different agents. In a recent survey, almost two-thirds of US adults shared that they believe valuing their time is the most important thing a brand can do to provide them with a good customer service experience.
Reduce your hold times and respond faster. There are many different ways to reduce hold times, and the right one will depend on your situation. Here are some ideas:
Is anything worse than finding it hard to reach a business when you need help?
Comcast/Xfinity is infamous for this, as Reddit threads like this show. Here’s a snippet from one user:
“I asked to cancel (which took 4 tries as it 'accidentally' kept hanging up on me in the process..) and I said the same to them. They offered $75 at first and I said no. They then offered $45. I thought about it, but they said that's only for a year then it's back to the "regular rate" I told them to cancel it then. Had my fiancée sign up immediately after that, and now we are locked in at $30 for two years.”
Is it possible that the phone system hung up on them four times? Technically, yes. But it’s highly unlikely.
Whether it’s unhelpful support agents, a chatbot that gets users caught in a loop, or burying your contact form deep in your help center, situations like these are incredibly frustrating. While offering great self-service is a critical part of a modern customer service strategy, you should always make it easy for users to get human help when they need it.
Whatever communication channels your support team offers, make them easy to find and access. Customers look to contact you when they have problems, so don’t create additional problems by making it hard to reach your support team.
Tactical tips to do this include:
We’ve seen examples of inadequate customer support and how to improve it. It’s tough to deliver a consistently great experience. It takes hard work and intentionality.
Across the board, there are a number of underlying reasons why bad customer experiences are still so prevalent. These include:
Negative customer experiences are damaging to your business. Your customers are your company’s most important resource, and building out systems that enable you to support them well won’t happen by accident.
At the same time, your customer service processes will always be evolving. This work is never done, so don’t focus on getting across a finish line that doesn’t exist.
Instead, make it a regular part of your routine to audit your customer experience and analyze customer feedback. By creating feedback loops that enable you to continually improve, you’ll build a flexible customer service operation that your customers can rely on.
May 14, 2025
6 Ways to Use AI in Your Email Inbox
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
AI and email management go hand in hand.
There are AI tools dedicated to helping you clean your inbox (like SaneBox) and plenty that help you draft emails better and/or faster.
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
At the end of each section, we'll cover some of the best AI email tools and AI assistants that can help you be more efficient in your inbox—whether you're a Gmail or Outlook user.
Here at Missive, our users get a lot of emails—100+ in a day in some cases. We crowdsourced the most practical, helpful AI suggestions that real businesses are using to maintain a clutter-free, productive inbox.
Before we jump into the examples, these are the three broad buckets where AI is used within inboxes:
For cleaning emails, there is usually a deep purging functionality (i.e., archive all emails before a certain date) as well as a new system to keep your inbox clean after the purge (i.e., auto-categorization into folders/labels). SaneBox is a great example of this bucket.
For drafting and writing emails, you can create prompts that take into consideration your writing style, structure, and tone and add in resources for AI to pull context from—most commonly, your knowledge base or website.
For kicking off other tasks—this is the most exciting part of AI within your inbox. Certain tools (like Missive's AI-powered rules) allow you to automate a set of actions based on the context of an email. Imagine every email gets assigned to the right people, a set of tasks is created, a label or folder is applied, and an entry is made in your CRM—without a single human interaction. That’s magic!
Let's get to the AI-powered magic.
We're highlighting Missive's AI-powered rules in the examples below, but you can create your own AI email automations with your favorite tools, and we include some recommendations.
Here are the 6 best AI email workflows.
Our inboxes get inundated every day, but not every email deserves equal attention. A clean inbox needs a system of categorization.
Historically, you could set up automations based on sender, message content, etc.—but now with AI, you can understand the context of emails, which changes email management entirely.
It's like having an AI assistant read each email and then categorize it based on the context within. It's far more robust than just looking at the sender domain.
If you don't already have some form of auto-labeling, auto-folder categorization, or archiving automation running, here are a few examples to get you started:
By auto-filing certain emails out of your inbox using AI, you'll be able to focus on the ones that need your attention. And when you have some free time, you can visit your newsletter label to catch up on industry insights.
Most modern email clients have some version of this built in. If you're looking for an add-on tool for Gmail or Outlook, we cover those below as well.
Missive — Inbox collaboration for teams
Superhuman — Great for keyboard shortcut lovers
Shortwave — For an AI-first inbox
SaneBox — AI email organizer that integrates with your existing client
Unroll.me — Alternative to SaneBox, bulk email cleaner for any provider
AI can save time inside your inbox—but using it to trigger external workflows is where the magic really happens.
Example: A real estate business receives emails from both buyers and sellers in a shared inbox. Their workflows are completely different, so we used AI to identify the intent and trigger specific assignments, tasks, and summaries for the right team members.
If you have different workflows depending on the email, you can use AI to detect the context and automate accordingly.
Relay.app — AI-first workflow builder
Zapier — Classic builder, now with AI
Missive — AI rules built into the collaborative inbox
Inbox maintenance is like pruning a tree—it requires regular attention.
With AI clients, workflow builders, or Missive rules, you can automatically clean up emails without manually clicking "unsubscribe."
Set it up narrowly (specific senders or domains) or broadly (based on open behavior, like emails unread for 30+ days).
Solutions like SaneBox include versions of this, though some manual training may be required.
Say you run an accounting firm where each client has a dedicated team and inbox.
Most messages are about invoices, but occasionally, an urgent email from the CEO arrives that needs management's attention.
AI can identify urgency and escalate the message automatically to the right person.
Other tools can do this too—but may require you to create specific folders/labels and rely on manual monitoring.
This works best if you have a large, public knowledge base or help center that the AI can reference. If you do, you can use one of the newer AI models that allow you to search the web.
Here's the prompt we use at Missive for our support team:
You are an expert customer support specialist for Missive, the collaborative team inbox platform. Your job is to draft accurate, empathetic, and clear replies to customer inquiries based only on official Missive documentation.
Note: Keep all responses strictly tied to Missive's documented functionality.
Now, if you want to get crazy with it. You can create an automation where a draft is created every time an incoming email fits a specific criteria. And you can use AI to help you determine which email triggers the automation.
Don't want to pay for contact enrichment tools? Use AI to summarize new prospects.
It adds context directly to the email thread, so you can start conversations better informed.
For more robust enrichment, tools like Clay or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce offer AI-powered data collection.
We hope these ideas help you clean emails, draft faster, and automate smarter.
All the tools mentioned above offer a “fresh start” feature to deep clean your inbox and begin anew.
Whether you're using SaneBox with your current client or switching to an AI-first inbox—there's no reason your email shouldn’t flow to the right people and places automatically after setting a few AI-powered rules.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client uniquely designed for teams—give Missive a try. No credit card needed, and our free trial includes access to AI rules.
February 5, 2024
How to Set Customer Service Goals for Success
Learn how to set customer service goals for success
When I took over the customer service team at my last company, it was during a period of transition.
We’d just gone through an acquisition which, although welcome, meant we needed to reassess our resources, our tools, and our team’s strategy for the foreseeable future. I was also stepping from a senior role into a management role, and while neither management nor the team were new to me, the situation was changing quickly.
This presented a challenge: quickly leading the team through setting new expectations and requirements, while still delivering the same excellent customer service experience for our customers.
It also gave us an opportunity to move from good to great — by understanding where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we might get there.
Maybe you’ve also just taken over a new team, or you’re also going through an acquisition or reorganization. Or maybe you’re just looking to level up your support team.
Regardless of why you’re here, this article will help you understand what SMART goals are in the context of customer service and how to define SMART customer service goals for your team. It includes some examples of great customer service goals, and it will show you how to measure the success of your goals so your team can continue to grow and adjust your customer service strategy as needed.
Table of Contents
Being on a ship with no destination is unpleasant and nerve-wracking for everyone aboard.
Setting solid customer service goals for your team provides a common purpose and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. It improves your odds of reaching your destination: consistent excellent customer service.
And beyond the psychological benefits of having clear goals, there are plenty of more tangible benefits too.
Clear customer service goals ensure that your team’s efforts align with the broader objectives of the company, so it’s clear how your team is contributing to business growth.
It also means both you and the company can make more informed decisions about budget and resource allocation, using the real data and trends you glean from measuring your progress against your goals.
Goals focused on customer satisfaction directly contribute to improving the overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, to make repeat purchases, and to recommend your business to others.
Consistently meeting and exceeding your customer service goals also builds your company’s reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, which is essential for long-term brand success.
Setting specific goals and measuring how each member works toward these objectives allows customer service teams and managers to identify strengths and weaknesses. It also allows individual team members to understand and direct their own professional development.
Well-defined goals also provide teams with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Team members who understand how their work contributes to larger goals are happier and more committed to the company’s success.
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. It’s a handy mnemonic tool that reminds everyone that effective goals are:
But why do the goals you set for your customer service team (or that they set for themselves) need to be SMART?
The point of setting goals is to be as clear as possible about expectations:
There shouldn’t be ambiguity in customer service goals. That’s because while a well-defined goal tells your team members what success looks like, it also acts as a catalyst or guide to help you get there.
This may be from a customer standpoint (satisfaction, response time, self-service, etc.), from an individual perspective (performance or professional development), or from a company perspective (cost per customer, retention rate, expansion rate, etc.).
First, keep in mind that you usually can’t jump right into creating a goal. There’s always an assessment period first.
You need to spend some time figuring out what the current state of your customer service team is.
Some questions you can ask to guide your assessment:
Your assessment will be highly dependent on your team and company, but these questions should give you an idea of the things you should consider as you work to define your goals.
Once you’ve done the foundational work to understand what your team needs to improve on, you can begin using that information to define your goals.
Let’s break it down in the context of a real customer service SMART goal.
Any goal you set should be clear and well-defined. For example, “answer customers faster” is a nice aim, but what are the channels where you want to answer customers faster? What does “faster” mean?
A more specific goal for reducing customer wait times would be to set a target first response time for a specific channel, such as: “Send a first response to customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Depending on your needs, you could get even more specific: “Send a response to customers inquiring about their order status in 60 seconds or less.”
Any customer service goal should be measurable, so you can understand whether you’ve achieved the goal (or not) and adjust your strategy appropriately.
Taking our example from above, a measurable target chat response time goal could be: “80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds.”
This is the point at which your initial assessment becomes really important.
“80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds” may sound like an achievable goal. It might be doable if you have a simple product or many agents trained and available to handle chats.
But what if you have only two chat agents and are receiving hundreds of chats each day?
Of course, you still want to strive to improve their first response times, but you’ll have to set reasonable expectations to give your agents a fair shot at success.
An attainable goal in this context might instead involve increasing the initial chat response time or decreasing the percentage of customers you’re targeting, like this:
Your context will determine what makes the most sense for your team. Just remember to aim for a goal that’s stretching, yet realistic.
This is another area in which your foundational assessment is key.
First, are your proposed customer service goals aligned with your customer service values and company’s objectives? If not, they won’t be effective or successful, no matter how well they fit the SMART parameters.
Secondly, are your goals relevant to your team? For instance, a manager with a high chat volume might adapt our example to involve implementing a chatbot in order to hit their desired initial chat response time goal.
But a manager with a low ticket volume probably can’t justify the time and expense of implementing a chatbot because the benefits will never outweigh the costs for their team.
This parameter is closely tied to being measurable. You won’t be able to determine whether you’ve succeeded unless you know when the goal needs to be achieved.
To make our example time-bound, we could edit it to read: “By the end of Q2 2024, we’ll be responding to 80% of customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Customer service goals aren’t just about how your agents interact with your customers. Surveys have shown again and again that customers want the option to solve their own problems.
A goal for developing effective self-service could be:
“By [DATE] we’ll have launched a knowledge base with articles answering our 10 most frequently asked questions about [PRODUCT], resulting in at least a 10% reduction in tickets about those issues.”
Many knowledge base tools will have built-in ticket deflection tracking features, such as giving you the number of views for an article and the number of tickets created after the article was viewed.
You can also measure the success of this goal by tracking ticket volume for a specific category or tag over time.
Implementing a quality assurance program is a great way to improve overall customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, and brand recognition. It’s also a more objective way to measure and track agent performance and to kick-off conversations about professional development with your team.
It might look like this:
“In January 2024, develop a draft QA scorecard based on ticket reviews from the previous 3 months, so that we can begin calibration sessions with the team in February 2024.”
In this case, measuring success is relatively simple: is the draft scorecard available by February 2024 when calibration conversations must begin?
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is crucial to your support team’s success, but also the overall success of the company. To build a customer-first organization, improving or maintaining your customer satisfaction score should be one of your main goals.
A sample goal for CSAT could be:
“Each month next quarter, maintain an overall CSAT across text channels (chat and email) of 85% or better.”
You can gather CSAT ratings using built-in tools on your customer communication platforms, or through a dedicated CSAT tool to send customer surveys. Most tools will calculate your CSAT score or percentage automatically.
As we’ve already covered, customer service agents are most engaged when they understand what their role is and can see how their contributions matter (both to their entire team and the company).
A goal for improving your customer service team’s overall engagement could be:
“Have a monthly one-on-one with each agent on my team and arrange at least one team social event a quarter, with the aim of reducing employee turnover by 10 percent by the end of the year.”
As you can see, this goal includes multiple conditions for success, and the team turnover rate is a metric that can be directly measured.
As a customer service manager, you get an especially broad view of how customers use and feel about your product. You also have the ability to take that customer feedback and put it in the hands of those who need it: your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and so on.
This can be as simple as implementing a public customer feature request tool where your customers can share their feedback and vote on what they want to see, or as complicated as setting up an internal, cross-functional customer feedback process.
The goal for becoming the voice of your customer could be:
“Have a bi-weekly Voice of the Customer meeting with the product development team, leading to at least one product bug fix and one new customer-requested feature release every quarter.”
You could measure this goal in a number of ways, depending on your strategy. If you have implemented a dedicated customer feedback tool, you can track customer usage against the rate of product releases and bug fixes. You could also track ticket volume in a specific category as well as any impact on CSAT ratings.
Everyone has their specialties and their weaknesses, and your customer service agents are no different. Quality assurance programs are a great way to identify areas for improvement, but you may also uncover opportunities during performance and career development conversations.
Your customer service reps can improve by seeking training in special topics, professional development courses, and peer support. Working with each team member to set and achieve goals for improvement fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
A good example of goal for your agent could be:
“Get training on my weakest skills as identified by our QA reviews during the next month so that my average handle time goes down to [TARGET] by the end of the quarter.”
They can measure the success of this goal through attendance and completion of training, as well as by looking for improved QA scores and handle times.
The more customer service agents take ownership of their customers’ experience, the happier both they and the customer will be.
Owning the customer’s experience will mean something different for every team. It may look like being the customer’s one point of contact for an issue, or it may mean acting as the customer’s guide as they move through the escalation process.
It may look like answering every CSAT rating, good and bad, to thank the customer for their thoughts and solicit more feedback. Or it may mean reviewing their own customer interactions, identifying missed opportunities for exceeding customer expectations or anticipating customer needs, and devising strategies for doing so in the future.
A goal for owning the customer experience could be:
“I’ll reduce my ticket escalation rate by X percent in Q2 by being the primary agent on tickets about Y topic.”
Measuring your growth at owning the customer experience will depend a lot on what specifically that means for your company. For the example above, you’d measure the achievement by looking at the percentage of tickets you’re still escalating on the specific topic.
As you’re building out goals for yourself or your customer service team, remember to take a step back occasionally and look at the big picture.
Are these goals aligned with your company and your team’s vision? Are they clear or confusing? Are they too inter-dependent, so that if you fail at one, you fail at them all?
There’s nothing magical about setting SMART goals. They’re a fantastic tool for customer service teams, but the real key is in making goal-setting a discipline and a habit you’re regularly engaging in. Setting goals is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process of adaptation and growth.
The landscape of customer service is always changing, and your goals will need to evolve with it.
