Respond to customer problems or complaints
Part of the output can be produced by software today.
Software drafts well and sends at volume, and vertical support agents now resolve a large share of inbound questions end to end. What does not transfer is the relationship, and the judgment about when a message should not be sent at all.
| How automatable | Partly automatable |
|---|---|
| Kind of work | Routine communication and explanation |
| Jobs that do it | 19 occupations |
| Tool categories that apply | Vertical agents, Builders |
| O*NET activity | Performing for or Working Directly with the Public (4.A.4.a.8) |
What this looks like on the job
Not our paraphrase. These are real task statements recorded against this activity, spread across the 19 occupations that perform it.
- Represent work unit at meetings or conferences and serve as liaison for requests or complaints.
- Respond to public suggestions and complaints.
- Investigate complaints or conflicts related to the alteration of public waters, gathering information, recommending alternatives, informing participants of progress, and preparing draft orders.
- Collect fines and respond to complaints about fines.
- Investigate and answer complaints regarding contested parking citations, determining their validity and routing them appropriately.
- Search for lost articles or for parents of lost children.
- Resolve customer complaints or answer customers' questions regarding policies and procedures.
- Answer customer questions regarding problems with their accounts.
- Return checks to customers or retrieve checks returned to customers in error, adjusting accounts and answering inquiries about errors as necessary.
- Resolve problems or discrepancies concerning customers' accounts.
- Correspond with customers and confer with coworkers to answer inquiries, discuss market fluctuations, or resolve account problems.
- Check to ensure that appropriate changes were made to resolve customers' problems.
- Investigate and correct errors upon customers' request, according to customer and bank records.
- Receive and respond to customer complaints.
- Hear and resolve complaints from customers or the public.
- Confer with customers or supervising personnel to address questions, problems, or requests for service or equipment.
- Respond to complaints regarding mail theft, delivery problems, and lost or damaged mail, filling out forms and making appropriate referrals for investigation.
- Confer or correspond with establishment representatives to rectify problems, such as damages, shortages, or nonconformance to specifications.
What we would actually use
One recommendation rather than a shortlist, because a shortlist is just your problem handed back. This is what we would buy for routine communication and explanation, and what it costs.
Drafting replies costs nothing beyond the assistant you already pay for. Only move to a support agent billed per resolution once the inbound volume is large enough that the per-resolution price beats the hour it takes you.
Chosen for the cheapest thing that does the job, not the best funded. Nothing on this site is sponsored, and the full landscape is there when you want to disagree with us.
The rest of the category
Context, not alternatives to weigh up. We name the layer rather than promise a named product does your specific task.
Matched from the kind of work, not from vendor marketing. Check any of them can reach the system your records actually live in — that connection, not the model, is where these projects stall.
How people actually do it
No workflow names this activity yet, but these automate the same kind of work, with the prompts to paste and what to keep for yourself.
Who does this work
19 occupations in the O*NET database perform this activity. Each one has a full breakdown of its other tasks.
- Administrative Services Managers
- Bill and Account Collectors
- Billing and Posting Clerks
- Brokerage Clerks
- Civil Engineering Technologists and Technicians
- Customer Service Representatives
- Dispatchers, Except Police, Fire, and Ambulance
- First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers
- Hydrologists
- Library Technicians
- New Accounts Clerks
- Office Clerks, General
- Order Clerks
- Parking Enforcement Workers
- Postal Service Clerks
- Receptionists and Information Clerks
- Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks
- Tellers
- Ushers, Lobby Attendants, and Ticket Takers
Work that goes with it
O*NET groups these under “Respond to customer problems or inquiries”. In practice they tend to be done by the same person, in the same sitting.
Method. The activity, its taxonomy placement and the occupations that perform it come straight from the public-domain O*NET 30.3 database. The automatability band is ours: we map each of O*NET’s 41 generalized work activities to how much of its output current software can produce, assuming a person still reviews and owns the result. It is a coarse three-way judgment on purpose. A precise-looking percentage here would be invented.