Customer expectations continue to rise, and delivering consistently excellent service has never been more important. The latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index (UKCSI) found that customer satisfaction increased by just 0.1 points since January, though it’s up 1 point since July 2025. However, 84.1% of customer experiences were resolved right first time, the best result ever recorded by the Index.
While this is encouraging for businesses investing in customer service, it also raises the bar for everyone else. Customers now expect fast responses, knowledgeable agents and seamless support across every channel. If your business is struggling to meet those expectations, it can quickly affect loyalty, reputation and revenue.
In this article, we’ll explore 5 of the most common customer service challenges businesses face and – more importantly – how to solve them.
1. Slow response times during busy periods
Customers don’t like waiting. Whether they’re calling, emailing or using live chat, long response times can quickly lead to frustration and lower satisfaction.
According to a SuperOffice study, 89% of customers expect a reply within one hour. And Zendesk found that 74% of customers expect customer service to be available 24/7, mainly due to AI chatbots.
If your team is struggling to respond to enquiries quickly, you need to put a strategy in place to improve response times before customer satisfaction drops. While you might think that increasing headcount is the only way to improve response times, there are other things you can do too:
- Review peak contact times: Have your peak contact hours changed? Do you have enough staff on shift during those times? Consider moving shifts around if you notice there are times when you’re overstaffed, and add them where they’re needed.
- Introduce service level targets: If you’ve not had response time targets in place before, implement them now. Make them stretch targets, but still attainable – start small, and as response times improve, increase the target. Incentives for team members who consistently meet their targets will help too.
- Route enquiries to the right people: If you have multiple teams, make sure their enquiries get to them first time. AI chatbots can be helpful here, as they can help triage calls, emails or live chats to the right department.
- Use overflow support: During busy periods, it’s unrealistic to expect your team to handle increased enquiries at the same response rate if they don’t have any extra help. Overflow support can help take the pressure off your team and keep your customers happy by outsourcing the extra calls to a trained team of agents.
2. Inconsistent customer experiences
Customers expect the same level of service every time they contact your business. Inconsistency can damage trust and make your brand seem disorganised. Salesforce found that 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, but 54% believe that these teams don’t share information.
When 70% of customers will abandon a brand after just two negative experiences, you can’t afford to have inconsistencies within your team.
If your agents are struggling to provide the same level of service across all channels and between departments, it’s likely there’s some work to do on your policies and procedures:
- Develop tone of voice guidelines: It helps agents to understand how you want to talk to your customers. Tone of voice (TOV) guidelines will ensure that your team speaks to all customers in the same way, without needing to give them a script.
- Create clear service processes: Ensure your team knows the procedure when it comes to dealing with different enquiries. Shipping enquiry? Check the CRM or tracking info. Complaint? Escalate to a manager immediately. When your agents know how to handle each enquiry, they’ll be dealt with sooner – and you’ll improve your customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
- Offer regular training: Customer service trends can change fast, as can your customers’ expectations. Make sure you run regular coaching and training sessions for your team so they can refresh their skills and keep up with changes in your industry.
- Make information accessible: Use shared knowledge bases and intranets to give all agents quick access to policies and FAQs that they might encounter with customers, so they can deal with questions quickly. Knowledge bases are also ideal if you work with an outsourced customer service team, as they’ll have the same information as your in-house agents.
3. Customer frustration with AI
Customers want more than ever. They expect answers to their queries quickly, wherever they try to contact you, and that’s led to many companies using AI assistants to speed up contact times.
However, as Fiona covered in her customer service trends article, while 43% of customers are most happy to deal with AI when they need a quick answer to a simple question, 80% of customers are concerned about being misunderstood or receiving inaccurate answers from AI. 67% are concerned about AI’s lack of empathy or understanding.
That means that when you use AI for more than just quick FAQs, customers get frustrated. Emotionally charged and nuanced queries still require human empathy and understanding, so it’s crucial that you still have enough agents available to resolve issues that AI can’t handle.
At OpenContact, we often get feedback such as “It was so good to talk to a human” and “Thank you for listening to me and sorting my problem,” so we know how much customers value the human touch. AI is fantastic for the quick and easy queries, but your customers need and deserve to speak to someone who understands your brand when it comes to more complex situations.
We support our customers’ use of AI chatbots for our customers – it makes sense to from both a business and customer standpoint. But here are our recommendations for getting the balance right between AI and human customer support:
- Use AI for simple, repetitive enquiries: AI is ideal for handling FAQs, checking order statuses, resetting passwords and directing customers to the right team. Automating these routine tasks frees your agents to focus on conversations that require more expertise.
- Make it easy to speak to a person: Customers shouldn’t have to fight their way through endless chatbot menus. Give them a clear and simple route to a human agent whenever they need one, particularly if their issue is urgent or complex.
- Train your AI regularly: AI is only as good as the information it’s given. Keep knowledge bases up to date and review conversations regularly to identify where your chatbot is giving incomplete or inaccurate responses.
- Let your agents handle the conversations that matter: Complaints, vulnerable customers, emotionally charged situations and high-value sales enquiries all benefit from empathy, active listening and good judgement. These are areas where human agents continue to outperform AI.
- Review customer feedback: Monitor customer satisfaction scores, chatbot interactions and agent feedback to understand where AI is adding value and where it’s creating friction. The right balance will vary depending on your customers and the types of enquiries you receive.
4. Difficulty supporting multiple contact channels
Customers now expect support to meet them where they’re at. Phone, email, live chat, social media – they expect brands to be available on all these channels so they can pick and choose how to contact you depending on their query.
73% of customers expect seamless journeys across all channels. But it can be difficult to manage them all without a clear strategy, particularly if your customers favour one channel over the others but still expect you to be available everywhere.
Here are our tips for managing multi-channel customer service:
- Map out the channels your customers actually use: A multi-contact customer service strategy doesn’t need to involve all channels you can think of. Focus on where your customers actually are, and analyse how they use each channel so you can provide the right support.
- Ensure visibility across channels: One of the most frustrating things for customers is when agents across different channels aren’t aware of previous conversations. If a customer has been in touch via live chat, but then makes a phone call to follow up, they expect the agent to be able to see details of the conversation that happened on live chat.
- Use a powerful CRM: A customer relationship management (CRM) system is crucial to help you manage multi-channel strategies. There are software solutions available that allow you to manage email, live chat, social media and more all through one platform, giving your agents flexibility and helping them join the dots between customer conversations.
- Consider omni- or multi-channel support: If you’re struggling to keep up with all of the channels your customers use, you could look into outsourced omni- or multi-channel customer support. It’ll give customers choice on how they contact you without increasing your headcount.
5. Missed sales opportunities
Every customer enquiry is a potential sale. But if calls go unanswered, emails sit in an inbox for hours or live chat enquiries aren’t followed up quickly, prospects may simply move on to a competitor.
Speed matters. Research from MIT and the Harvard Business Review found that businesses are almost seven times more likely to qualify a lead if they respond within an hour, compared with waiting longer, while companies that respond to leads within 5 minutes are 100 times more likely to make contact with a prospect.
There are several things we recommend to ensure sales opportunities don’t slip through the cracks:
- Review how enquiries are handled: Map the journey from the moment a customer gets in touch to when they receive a response. Look for bottlenecks that delay follow-up or create unnecessary handovers.
- Prioritise new enquiries: Not every customer contact has the same urgency. Give sales enquiries higher priority so potential customers aren’t left waiting while lower-priority tasks are completed.
- Train agents to identify opportunities: Every interaction should be treated as more than just a customer service query. Train your team to recognise buying signals, answer product questions confidently and book appointments or pass qualified leads to your sales team.
- Use outsourced sales support: If your internal team can’t respond quickly enough, an outsourced sales and campaign response service can engage prospects, qualify leads and book appointments on your behalf, ensuring every opportunity receives a timely response.
Every business faces customer service challenges at some stage. The key is recognising them early and putting the right processes, technology and people in place before they begin to affect customer satisfaction and sales.
Whether you need support during busy periods, help managing multiple contact channels or a fully outsourced customer service solution, OpenContact can act as a seamless extension of your team. Our experienced, UK-based agents provide flexible support that’s tailored to your business, helping you deliver the responsive, consistent service your customers expect.
If you’d like to explore how outsourced customer support could help your business overcome these challenges, get in touch with our team for a free, no-obligation meeting. We’ll take the time to understand your requirements and recommend a solution that works for your customers, your team and your budget.
