Businesses usually only see a bad customer experience once it becomes a public complaint. But they don’t see what led up to it. Did the customer try to call or send a message to the company?
In our recent survey, 86.8% of consumers said they’d tried to contact a company before posting a review. So, for most of them, writing a public review was their last resort after exhausting other ways to resolve the issue.
To help companies understand what led to a negative review, PissedConsumer has introduced a new feature called Customer Interaction Details. It shows whether the customer tried to contact the company before writing the review.
We asked Paulina Kravtsova, PissedConsumer’s Head of Customer Support, to answer a few questions about why this context matters and how it can help support teams and customer experience leaders better understand their customers.
Q: Why did PissedConsumer decide to introduce the Customer Interaction Details feature, and how does it help businesses?
Paulina: We always encourage businesses to reply and engage with their consumers. The problem is that many companies respond with a generic message, like, “We’re sorry. Please contact our support team, and we’ll help you.”
This doesn't always happen simply because that's what their guidelines say. Businesses often lack the context and details they need to give consumers personalized answers. When support agents see just a username and a complaint, they don’t have enough information to write a tailored response.
But a polite answer isn’t enough. Consumers want to see companies act.
As a platform, we believe that a dialogue between the consumer and the company leads to a good outcome for both sides.
With Customer Interaction Details, businesses can better understand the customer journey leading up to a review. They can see why the customer called, how long the call lasted, and whether the problem was actually solved. They can also analyze the review the customer left afterward.
Q: How does PissedConsumer know if a customer called a company before writing a review?
Paulina: I’d start by saying that companies often think consumers come to our platform only to leave negative reviews. But that’s not really what happens. People come to PissedConsumer to find a company’s contact details and reach out for help.
People call companies directly through our website, and we log these interactions. We may ask consumers to take a short survey about the call and whether their issue was resolved.
After that, consumers may also leave a review, and we link their call history to it.
Q: Can you give us an example of how this helps a business respond to a bad review?
Paulina: It helps businesses understand what triggered a customer to leave a review. Did the customer run into any issues while getting support?
It’s often easier to catch a customer’s dissatisfaction during a live conversation, where their feedback can provide businesses with immediate context. In contrast, a written review offers only part of the picture. To understand what led to it and provide the proper resolution, businesses need more information about the customer’s interactions that came before it.
Just recently, one of our clients shared a success story with us. Here’s what happened: a consumer left a negative review about a company, and the company saw that there'd been a call before the review was posted.
Thanks to this information, the team already knew that the consumer had tried to contact the support team.
So the company dug into the details of that specific interaction and found where the problem or misunderstanding had occurred.
Instead of sending a template response to the negative review, they proactively reached out to the consumer, called him back, addressed the misunderstanding, and took the necessary steps to fix the issue. They also replied to the negative review publicly.
As a result, the customer was happy and marked the complaint as resolved. This outcome also improved the company’s rating and made prospective customers trust the company more.
Q: What would you recommend businesses to do when they see this information about customer calls?
Paulina: My advice is to gather more information about the situation. Don’t rush to reply with a standard answer. Typically there’s more to a customer’s experience than the review itself. Start by looking into the context behind it.
Check your internal CRM and look at the customer’s call history. Try to understand what happened during the customer’s previous interactions and why the issue still remains unresolved. Then use this context to write a reply that fits the customer’s situation.
If there’s still a chance to make things right for this customer, a follow-up call is a great opportunity to turn their experience around.
Second, zoom out and look at the bigger picture. For business owners and CX leaders, these insights can reveal patterns across customer interactions and highlight opportunities to improve the overall customer experience. A single negative review may be an isolated case, but similar feedback from multiple customers may point to a recurring issue relating to a particular branch, customer journey stage, or product feature.
Maybe your customers don’t understand the refund policy. Maybe they find the onboarding tedious. Or maybe they just want to talk to a real person instead of AI. Customer Interaction Details helps businesses identify these patterns and fix the root causes.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to contact our support team.
To get more context about the customer interactions that preceded your company’s reviews, request a free trial.
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- While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this publication, it is not intended to provide any legal, medical, accounting, investment or any other professional advice as individual cases may vary and should be discussed with a corresponding expert and/or an attorney.
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