You Don’t Need an Army for Complaint Management

A customer opens the package they have been eagerly waiting for and is met with an unpleasant surprise: the product is defective. Sometimes it is minor damage caused during transportation; sometimes it is a flaw that slipped through during production...

Their first instinct is to contact us. Through the contact form on our website, the marketplace messaging area, Instagram DMs, or email...

Today, the person responsible for complaint management is expected to work like an octopus and keep track of every channel at once. Incoming requests need to be monitored, matched with order information, and any missing information needs to be requested from the customer.

Then the real work begins: What is the complaint about? A delivery delay? A return? A damaged product? Is any action required? If so, who should take it? At which stage should the customer be informed, and what information should be provided?

In an ideal world, the process does not end when the customer’s problem is resolved. The responsible person or team should act proactively. If there is a problem in the process, it should be made visible. Recurring issues should not simply be accepted as normal. If similar defects are appearing in products from a particular supplier, or shipments handed over to Carrier X are consistently arriving late, this information should flow to the right people.

Fortunately, most of these steps are suitable for automation.

“Bought prdct last week, still not here. Cant reach courier. Call me 5555555.” Artificial intelligence can extract the phone number, the customer’s request, and the fact that the problem is a delivery delay. The system can use the phone number to identify the customer and then locate the relevant order. What follows is largely traditional automation. It checks the shipment status, reviews the estimated delivery date, and acts according to predefined rules. If the delivery date has not yet passed, it can share the tracking link; if it has passed and there has been no movement, it can assign a task to the relevant operations owner.

Now imagine requests from every channel flowing into the same inbox. Standard cases can be resolved by the system. In more complex cases, it can prepare the customer response and present the employee with a case that is ready for a decision.

Once the system has accumulated enough data, it can also start telling you things like this: Complaints are concentrated around the same product group. One carrier has a higher delay rate. A particular product description is consistently misunderstood. Products from a specific supplier have a higher return rate.

So, what does a system like this look like from a cost perspective? As you know, one of the first questions that comes up around AI and automation investments is cost. The answer: this can be done at a very modest cost.

With Chatwoot for a multichannel inbox, Make for automation, and a pay-as-you-go AI API, a small business can build the first version of this system without making a major software investment.

We connect supported request channels, including WhatsApp, to Chatwoot. When a request arrives, Chatwoot triggers Make and the relevant scenario runs. Make collects the necessary customer, order, and shipment information from the relevant systems; the AI API interprets and categorizes the request and helps determine the recommended action, from that point on, automation takes over again: Make executes the predefined action and, when necessary, responds to the customer through Chatwoot. Especially in simple scenarios, there is almost nothing left for an employee to do.

For a small business receiving around 1,000 requests per month and using the system with one or two employees, the basic monthly software cost of these tools is around USD 50.

Small and medium-sized businesses can enjoy the benefits of this transformation without making major investments by connecting their existing systems, automating repetitive tasks, and involving people only where human judgment is required.

Remember, you no longer need an army for complaint management.

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