Customer complaint software

No business likes getting customer complaints, but they do provide valuable insights on improving your products, services, or customer experience. The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023 found that more than half of customers will switch to a competitor after only one bad experience. That means when a customer complaint comes in, you’ve likely got one shot to flip the script and turn their negative experience into a positive one.

Our guide breaks down the top features and benefits, offers side-by-side comparisons, and answers frequently asked questions so you can choose the right customer complaint management software for your business.

Table of contents

• What is customer complaint software?

• Customer complaint software comparison chart

• The 13 best customer complaint systems

• Features of customer complaint software

• Benefits of complaint management solutions

• How to choose the right software for managing customer complaints

• Frequently asked questions for complaint software

• Try customer complaint software for free

Customer complaint software helps businesses manage customer complaints and negative feedback in a unified platform. The right software allows your:

• Support teams to receive, track, respond to, and resolve complaints efficiently
  

• Management teams to analyze metrics, identify trends, and gather insights captured from customer feedback software

With this information, decision-makers can make improvements to products and services to reduce future complaints.

The right solution should have the capabilities to help your team address customer complaints quickly and collect key data to prevent future issues. Our chart lets you compare the best complaint management software to pick the right fit for your business.

Now let's take a deeper dive into the top customer complaint solutions. The sections discuss key details of each platform and break down pricing tiers, features, and free trial options.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk is the only vendor exclusively focused on the customer experience. With our complaint management software, startups, small businesses, or enterprise-level companies have everything needed to manage customer complaints and deliver the best customer experience.

Our flexible and agile platform allows you to adapt to change and scale quickly. It features powerful tools that are easy to understand—giving agents the autonomy to ramp quickly, providing the best total cost of ownership from day one.

Zendesk provides real-time updates about incoming messages and surfaces what agents need to focus on first—based on the customer and defined service level agreements. By removing the guesswork, agents can prioritize issues and respond quickly, resulting in higher productivity and customer satisfaction.

The software features AI-powered customer service tools that enhance the customer experience and extend the abilities of your agents. These tools include:

• Chatbots that use machine learning to improve customer service with every interaction and track and predict customer behavior to anticipate their needs.

• Intelligence built into the workspace that surfaces suggested responses (macros) based on the conversation content to help agents navigate customer complaints.

• Advanced triage tools that provide agents with full context before each conversation.

Additionally, Zendesk AI can help bots understand customer sentiment, intent, and language. This helps the bots better serve the customer and resolve issues without involving a human agent. For scenarios that need a human touch, a seamless bot-to-human handoff can occur, escalating the customer to the best-suited agent, with all the information and context included.

Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams let you loop in management, teammates, or other departments, to easily and effectively collaborate on customer complaints. The interactions automatically get added to the conversation in the Agent Workspace, providing valuable information and context to anyone with access.

With advanced reporting and analytics tools, you can leverage AI insights and layer them over your support metrics. This results in more meaningful insights that help you make good data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

Pre-built dashboards with real-time reporting work out of the box so you can easily uncover trends and seamlessly share insights across the business. You can also customize reports and dashboards with point-and-click configuration to surface what's relevant to your business.

Features

• Routing

• AI and automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Integrated customer surveys

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• Support Team: $19 per agent/month

• Support Professional: $49 per agent/month

• Support Enterprise: $99 per agent/month

  *Plans are billed annually

Free trial:

14 days

2. HappyFox

HappyFox complaint management software allows teams to receive, track, and respond to customer complaints. Its ticket dashboard lets you categorize, tag, and resolve complaints based on priority, status, and assigned agent. HappyFox also allows you to automate workflows and repetitive tasks.

The platform can receive customer complaints across multiple channels like phone, live chat, and email. HappyFox offers reporting and analytics tools that provide management metrics about their help desk and agent performance. HappyFox also has a support widget on its website so customers can submit a ticket without drafting an email.

Features

• Omnichannel ticketing

• Automation

• Routing

• Support widget

• Reporting and analytics

• Self-service options

• Customer complaint tracking

Pricing

• Mighty: $29 per agent/month

• Fantastic: $49 per agent/month

• Enterprise: $69 per agent/month

• Enterprise Plus: $89 per agent/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

14 days

Learn more about HappyFox Workflows for Zendesk.

3. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is an online customer complaint management system that provides multi-channel support, reporting and analytics, collaboration tools, and an automated customer feedback system. By offering round-robin and rule-based routing capabilities, users can choose the best option to fit their business needs. Teams can tag colleagues on tickets and collaborate through private comments that the customer can’t see.

The agent collision feature alerts agents when multiple agents view the same customer complaint ticket, helping to prevent both agents from repeating the same work. Zoho Desk also offers integrations with third-party apps like Zendesk and Slack.

Features

• Multi-channel support

• Routing

• Automation

• Collaboration tools

• Agent collision alerts

• Integrations

• Service-level agreements (SLAs)

• Macros

• Reporting and analytics

• Surveys

Pricing

• Standard: $14 per user/month

• Professional: $23 per user/month

• Enterprise: $40 per user/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

15 days

Learn more about the Zoho CRM app for Zendesk.

4. Freshdesk

Freshdesk customer complaint management software helps businesses handle customer complaints from different channels. It allows agents to discover the root cause of an issue, follow up with customers, and facilitate a resolution.

The collaboration tools can help teams communicate and share ownership of trouble tickets, while automation options allow agents to categorize, assign, and route customer complaints. Freshdesk also has a preset for predefined responses to address frequently reported complaints.

Features

• Omnichannel support

• Collaboration tools

• Automation

• Routing

• Self-service options

• Reporting and analytics

• Customer complaint tracking

• Integrations

Pricing

• Free: $0 per agent/month (up to 10 agents)

• Growth: $15 per agent/month

• Pro: $49 per agent/month

• Enterprise: $79 per agent/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

21 days

5. QualtricsXM

QualtricsXM offers a customer complaint management system that collects customer feedback from multiple channels and tracks customer complaints from end to end. Its reporting tools help surface insights that help your customer support team improve the customer experience.

The AI-powered automation enables prewritten responses for common complaints and offers self-service options so customers can help find answers to common customer complaints on their own time. QualtricsXM also lets you create and configure your own surveys.

Features

• Omnichannel support

• Survey builder

• Reporting and analytics

• Automatic alerts

• Integrations

• Automated workflows

• Customer complaint tracking

Pricing:

• Contact Qualtrics

Free trial:

Unavailable

Learn more about the Qualtrics app for Zendesk.

6. RingCentral

RingCentral provides a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses manage customer complaints and breaks down its service offerings into self-service, live service, and delayed service.

The self-service options include chatbots and help center articles that help customers find answers to common complaints. Live service includes phone or live chat where the customer submits their complaint to a human agent in real time. Delayed service means asynchronous support, where the complaint gets submitted via email, ticket, or social media, and the conversation starts and stops seamlessly across channels and agents.

Features

• Routing

• AI and automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing:

• Essentials: Contact sales

• Standard: Contact sales

• Premium: Contact sales

• Ultimate: Contact sales

  *Contact Center pricing

Free trial:

14 days

Learn more about RingCentral Cloud App for Zendesk.

7. ProProfs Help Desk

ProProfs Help Desk features complaint management software for businesses of all sizes. It consolidates complaints across multiple channels and has features that help agents track complaint tickets throughout their lifespan. The system can prioritize and escalate tickets and route them to an agent.

Reporting and analytics allow management to monitor team and business performance by tracking relevant metrics, KPIs, and customer surveys. ProProfs Help Desk enables customers to create complaint tickets via a web form and upload attachments. They also use chatbots to help with self-service and canned responses for quick replies to FAQs.

Features

• AI and automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Integrated customer surveys

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• ProProfs Help Desk: $20 per user/month

  *Plan is billed annually.

Free trial:

15 days

Learn more about the ProProfs app for Zendesk.

8. LiveAgent

LiveAgent provides a complaint management system that can engage with customers quickly through omnichannel support. Customers can create complaint tickets and attach invoices, screenshots, or other relevant information to their tickets for added information. Agents can track customer complaints and receive alerts for status changes or ticket updates.

LiveAgent features customer complaint reply templates, enabling automatic responses for common complaints. The platform escalates and prioritizes tickets so agents can address them quickly. Additionally, LiveAgent has digital time-stamping capabilities to record interactions and touchpoints for the complaint.

Features

• Routing

• Automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• Small: $9 per agent/month

• Medium: $29 per agent/month

• Large: $49 per agent/month

• Enterprise: $69 per agent/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

14 days

9. Jira Service Management

Atlassian’s IT service management (ITSM) tool called Jira Service Management helps teams track and manage complaints, incidents, issues, and requests. Jira Service Management features customizable workflows, reporting and analytics, time tracking, and knowledge base articles accessible through Confluence, another Atlassian tool. Its embedded widget allows customers to submit a complaint request on the Atlassian website.

Jira has self-service options that use machine learning and enable its bots to make suggestions to customers that can help them find answers. Jira also sends customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys and tracks the feedback to measure customer satisfaction.

Features

• Routing

• Automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (up to 3 agents)

• Standard: $21 per agent/month

• Premium: $47 per agent/month

• Enterprise: Contact sales

Free trial:

7 days

Learn more about Zendesk for Jira.

10. Front

Front is a customer service solution that sees customer complaints as an opportunity to build relationships. Front’s software automatically flags complaints and routes the ticket to a shared inbox. The ticket is prioritized and assigned to the best-suited agent to address it quickly.

Front features templated responses consistent with your support team's voice, messaging, and phrasing. You can also set custom “if-then” rules to route customer complaints to specific agents that meet the criteria, so the complaint doesn’t get passed around and slip through the cracks.

Features

• Routing

• Automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• Starter: $19 per seat/month

• Growth: $59 per seat/month

• Scale: $99 per seat/month

• Premier: $229 per seat/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

7 days

11. Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud provides agents with tools to manage customer complaints. The platform features a single view for the agent with customer data, history, and prior interactions for fast support. It has case management capabilities so agents can track customer complaints from submission to resolution.

With call management, agents can track and manage conversations and record calls. Automated routing prioritizes the ticket and sends it to the right agent to handle. Additionally, Salesforce offers self-service portals so that customers can submit issues and monitor ticket status.

Features

• Routing

• AI and automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• Starter: $25 per user/month

• Professional: $75 per user/month

• Enterprise: $150 per user/month

• Unlimited: $300 per user/month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

30 days

Learn more about Salesforce for Zendesk.

12. Apptivo Help Desk

Apptivo’s multichannel help desk can help its users manage customer complaints. The ticketing system automatically converts customer complaints into tickets and assigns the appropriate agent to track and manage them. The interaction history and customer data attached to the ticket give the agent the information needed to address the complaint.

Apptivo Help Desk analyzes information across channels, consolidating interactions and customer data in one place. Apptivo’s reporting features are standard, but it can integrate with third-party apps.

Features

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• Lite: $8 per user/month

• Premium: $12 per user/month

• Ultimate: $20 per user/month

• Enterprise: Contact Apptivo

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

30 days

13. Sprinklr Complaint Management

Sprinklr features complaint tracking from start to finish in a single unified platform. Automated messaging and acknowledgments allow you to communicate with customers with updates on their complaints. Sprinklr also tracks repeat complaints and helps identify their root causes. This enables your team to avoid future issues.

Sprinklr’s customer complaint system uses AI and machine learning for social listening across 30 digital and social channels. This allows you to understand what customers are saying about your brand—both good and bad—and respond to customer complaints.

Features

• Routing

• AI and automations

• Reporting and analytics

• Complaint tracking

• Escalation and prioritization workflows

• Integrations

Pricing

• Advanced (Self-service only): $249 per seat/month

• Enterprise: Contact Sprinklr

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

90 days

Learn more about the Sprinklr app for Zendesk.

When dealing with frustrated customers, it’s important to have customer complaint software with features that help you manage the problem efficiently. These key features can put your team in a position for success.

AI and automations

AI can analyze customer complaints through email and messaging and automatically generate support tickets, complete with customer context. AI chatbots can understand intent and sentiment and seamlessly hand off a customer to the best-suited agent to address the complaint. You can also automate repetitive tasks like sending response emails and automated customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.

Escalation and prioritization workflows

Customers expect fast service, especially when a complaint is involved. Leverage automation for the ticket queue so that the most important and time-sensitive ones are prioritized. Additionally, you can set alerts and configure service-level agreement (SLA) rules that help keep tickets from slipping through the cracks. Bots and messaging tools with automated self-service flows help deflect and reduce ticket escalation without involving a human agent.

Reporting and analytics

Real-time reporting and analytics dashboards help you better understand and predict customer satisfaction. Visibility into ticket volume, customer satisfaction score, agent performance, and complaint trends can help you identify areas of improvement and amplify the customer's voice.

Pre-built dashboards provide reports with important standard metrics for your industry. Customizable dashboards allow managers to generate custom reports that allow management to delve into data for deeper analysis and understanding.

Routing

Customer complaints can come from any channel, like phone, email, live chat, SMS, or social media. It’s important to use an effective routing system to quickly route customer complaints to the right agent, especially for escalated issues or high-stakes customers. Get conversations to the right agents efficiently. Admins can easily create routing models that route by request type, channel, priority, agent availability, and skill set.

Integrations

Integrations with other apps, systems, and tools can help maximize the effectiveness of your customer complaint software. Integrating with customer relationship management (CRM) and service desk software allows you to consolidate customer data into a single workspace and streamline workflows.

Adding communication channels like WhatsApp Business and Messenger allow you to meet the customer where they are, making for an effortless customer experience. Integrations with collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams make it easy for your teams to share information and context to help facilitate proactive solutions to customer complaints.

Complaint management systems can benefit your business in many ways. It keeps your teams organized, tracks complaints from submission to resolution, and gleans valuable insights that enable continuous improvement. Here are a few top benefits of complaint management systems.

• Identify trends and get ahead of customer issues

  Complaint management systems can reveal trends in customer pain points, allowing teams to take action to prevent future issues from occurring. Reporting and analytics can identify ticket spikes with common issues, and customer feedback provides insight into recurring issues.

  Reverb, an online marketplace dedicated to buying, selling, and providing information about musical instruments, used insights from Zendesk complaint management software to get ahead of customer needs. With Zendesk, Reverb created proactive workflows, ultimately reducing common customer requests.

• Increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn

  Using a complaint management solution allows your business to resolve customer complaints quickly and efficiently. Trouble ticketing helps prioritize and efficiently route tickets to the proper support agents to handle the issue swiftly, and self-service deflects inquiries or collects relevant information for the agent upon handoff.

  Automating a CSAT survey allows customers to rate and offer feedback on the support they received, providing actionable insights for your business.

  By implementing the feedback, you’re amplifying the voice of the customer, increasing customer satisfaction, and reducing churn.

• Improve agent efficiency

  Customers expect fast service, especially when a complaint is involved. Automation, triggers, and standardized responses improve workflows and reduce the time it takes tickets to get to the right person. It reduces customer frustrations and improves agent efficiency by prioritizing and efficiently routing negative sentiments and conversations to the right agent.

• Proactively give customers the information they need before they get upset

Anticipating customers’ needs and providing them with information before they ask for it diffuses a situation before it can escalate. Some examples of how customer complaint software can help deliver proactive customer service include:

• Providing shipping status and tracking numbers as soon as they’re available

• Sending an email about shipping delays

• Advising the customer about outstanding payments before it causes order delays

For example, Reverb’s system proactively prompts its sellers to add tracking numbers to shipments and sends payment reminders to customers, resulting in fewer requests about incomplete orders.

• Create engagement opportunities

  It makes for an uncomfortable situation when customers reach out to support teams with complaints, and it can also be a public affair if they turn to social media to air their grievances. Customer complaint software helps streamline workflows so issues get addressed quickly. Insights gained from prior interactions allow agents to proactively connect with customers and create more engagement opportunities.

The right customer complaint solution for your business depends on several factors. Here are a few things to consider to help you lock in your decision.

Make sure the software is easy to use

The software should be easy to use—or you’ll be the one filing a complaint. Some software options, like Zendesk, offer a free trial that gives you access to the full suite of features. Take the software for a test drive to learn how easy it is to use and how it fits your business's needs.

Find a solution that's flexible through change

Software that’s flexible and can adapt to changing business needs allows you to make adjustments easily. Say you receive an influx of customer feedback complaining that you don’t offer support on WhatsApp. Adding new channels lets you meet the customer where they are and boost their satisfaction.

Consider the total cost of ownership and time to value

When choosing your customer complaint software, it’s important to consider the total cost of ownership and time to value.

Total cost of ownership means the purchase price plus any additional or hidden costs. For example, you aren’t just paying the mortgage when you buy a house. You’re also paying for insurance, property taxes, repairs, utilities, and more. The same goes for customer complaint software—you’re paying for more than just the licensing fees.

Consider any hidden costs like implementation costs, additional agent training, downtime from unreliable software, employee and customer churn resulting from bad service because of a clunky interface, and more.

Fast time to value means your software sets up easily so you can hit the ground running with a seamless transition. With intuitive software, agents spend less time onboarding and can start using it with less training, resulting in a fast ROI.

These answers to frequently asked questions can help you fill any remaining blank spaces when deciding on your customer complaint software.