Customer complaint software

No business likes getting customer complaints, but they do provide valuable insights on improving your products, services, or customer experience. Many customers will even switch to a competitor after only one bad experience.

That means when negative feedback comes in, you need to leverage customer complaint software to help manage the influx and retain a high level of satisfaction and, ultimately, customer loyalty. Read on for side-by-side comparisons of the top customer complaint management software plus their top features, benefits, and more, all in this guide.

Table of contents

• What is customer complaint software?
• The 13 best customer complaint software
• Features of customer complaint software
• Benefits of complaint management solutions
• How to choose the right customer complaints software
• Frequently asked questions
• Try customer complaint software for free

Customer complaint software helps businesses manage customer complaints and negative feedback in a unified solution. 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 guide lets you compare the best complaint management software to pick the right fit for your business.

• Zendesk: Best for scalable, AI-powered customer service
• HappyFox: Best for small businesses seeking simple ticket management
• Zoho Desk: Best for context-aware customer support
• Freshdesk: Best for startups requiring fast implementation and intuitive workflows
• QualtricsXM: Best for organizations focused on CX analytics
• RingCentral: Best for teams needing integrated phone and digital communication
• ProProfs Help Desk: Best for knowledge-centered support teams
• LiveAgent: Best for businesses prioritizing real-time customer engagement
• Jira Service Management: Best for IT teams managing both support and development
• Front: Best for collaborative customer communication across departments
• Salesforce Service Cloud: Best for Salesforce users
• Apptivo Help Desk: Best for budget-conscious businesses needing customizable solutions
• Sprinklr Complaint Management: Best for social media complaint management

1. Zendesk

Best for scalable, AI-powered customer service

Zendesk is 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 andagile software 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 excellent 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 (SLAs). By removing the guesswork, agents can prioritize issues and respond quickly, resulting in higher productivity and customer satisfaction.

The AI-powered customer service software enables a people-centric customer experience and extends your agents' abilities with intuitive tools. These tools include:

• AI agents that autonomously analyze customer sentiment, intent, and language and offload up to 80 percent of customer requests to free up agents’ time.
• 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.

Zendesk AI powers AI agents to better serve the customer and resolve issues without involving a human agent. For scenarios that need a human touch, a seamless AI-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.

G2 rating: 4.3

Capterra rating: 4.4

What people are saying:

• “Our sales and customer relationships have been strengthened by Zendesk.”
• “It seems like there are lots of things that I have to learn since this tool is like a one-stop shop.”
• “There are occasional short maintenance periods or downtimes.”

2. HappyFox

Best for businesses seeking simple ticket management

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.

G2 rating: 4.5

Capterra rating: 4.6

What people are saying:

• “I love how easy and intuitive their software is to set up and configure.”
• “Strong basic functionality—unclear how to get the most out of it.”
• “The chat history view is poor…This should be organized better.”

Learn more: Discover how HappyFox integrates with Zendesk.

3. Zoho Desk

Best for context-aware customer support

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 for context-aware support.

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.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.5

What people are saying:

• “Great features and a great program.”
• “The automation rules and workflows of Zoho Desk can be limiting.”
• “It’s cumbersome to make changes if you have multiple teams or fields nesting under other ones.”

Learn more: Discover how Zoho CRM integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Zoho compare.

4. Freshdesk

Best for startups requiring fast implementation and intuitive workflows

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 pre-defined responses to address frequently reported complaints, making it an option for startups that need to implement quickly.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.5

What people are saying:

• “Efficient and seamless customer support.”
• “Enhancement to make the interface even faster and more flexible would make it an even better tool.”
• “After a year or so of fast growth, we found Freshdesk lacking in additional features.”

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Freshdesk compare.

5. QualtricsXM

Best for organizations focused on CX analytics

QualtricsXM offers a customer complaint management system that collects customer feedback from multiple channels and tracks customer complaints. Its reporting tools help surface CX analytics 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.

G2 rating: 4.3

Capterra rating: N/A

What people are saying:

• “Qualtrics is a comprehensive and dynamic platform for tailored experience programs.”
• “The look and feel of the platform is not up-to-date.”
• “A plethora of technical shortcomings.”

Learn more: Discover how Qualtrics integrates with Zendesk.

6. RingCentral

Best for teams needing integrated phone and digital communication

RingCentral provides a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses manage customer complaints and integrates its phone and digital service offerings.

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.

G2 rating: 4.0

Capterra rating: 4.2

What people are saying:

• “Intuitive and easy-to-use and learn interface.”
• “Robust and flexible, but there’s a learning curve.”
• “There were multiple issues with RingCentral, including technical issues resulting in call transfer not functioning.”

Learn more: Discover how RingCentral integrates with Zendesk.

7. ProProfs Help Desk

Best for knowledge-centered support teams

ProProfs Help Desk features complaint management software for businesses of all sizes. It consolidates complaints across multiple channels and has features that help bolster knowledge-centered support teams that can 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.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.9

What people are saying:

• “Their support team is super friendly and always available.”
• “I’m not much impressed with their integration options to third-party tools.”
• “This tool is not a full-fledged ITSM tool.”

Learn more: Discover how ProProfs integrates with Zendesk.

8. LiveAgent

Best for businesses prioritizing real-time customer engagement

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 in real time and receive alerts for status changes or ticket updates.

The tool 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.

G2 rating: 4.5

Capterra rating: 4.7

What people are saying:

• “LiveAgent worked very well and was easy to use.”
• “[Making the tool work for me] requires some work and learning the ins and outs of the platform.”
• “There are a lot of analytics features that feel like they’re missing, and it’s not HIPAA-compliant.”

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. LiveAgent compare.

9. Jira Service Management

Best for IT teams managing both support and development

Atlassian’s IT service management (ITSM) tool called Jira Service Management helps support and development teams track and manage complaints, incidents, issues, and requests. The tool 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.

G2 rating: 4.2

Capterra rating: 4.5

What people are saying:

• “Very good backend support for Jira users.”
• “It’s not as intuitive for users who are not in the technology environment.”
• “Reporting is terrible.”

Learn more: Discover how Jira integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Jira Service Desk compare.

10. Front

Best for collaborative customer communication across departments

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.

The software 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 across departments to specific agents that meet the criteria so the complaint doesn’t get passed around and slip through the cracks.

G2 rating: 4.7

Capterra rating: 4.6

What people are saying:

• “A sleek, powerful, and simple way of doing email.”
• “Has potential, but needs upgrades, which customer support always delays.”
• “The search function is unclear, which makes it difficult to find the right answers.”

Learn more: Discover how Zendesk vs. Front compare.

11. Salesforce Service Cloud

Best for Salesforce users

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 for handling. Additionally, Salesforce offers self-service portals so that customers can submit issues and monitor ticket status.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.4

What people are saying:

• “Powerful and customizable platform.”
• “Requires us to get IT technical resources involved to make configuration changes.”
• “Lacks a fresh UI and has a poor user experience. It’s not built with a modern design.”

Learn more: Discover how Salesforce integrates with Zendesk and how Zendesk vs. Salesforce compare.

12. Apptivo Help Desk

Best for budget-conscious businesses needing customizable solutions

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.

The tool 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 and be customized to different user specifications.

G2 rating: 4.4

Capterra rating: 4.4

What people are saying:

• “The chat support is extremely effective!”
• “They offer a lot of solutions and knowing how to use them in the best way is sometimes a lot for me.”
• “Lacking some key features that I need.”

13. Sprinklr Complaint Management

Best for social media 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.

The software’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.

G2 rating: 4.0

Capterra rating: 4.2

What people are saying:

• “Sprinklr Social helps me manage multiple jobs as one person.”
• “Small glitches or bugs can take a while to be addressed by customer support.”
• “Sprinklr Social is an extremely bulky platform for a moderator.”

Learn more: Discover how Sprinklr integrates with Zendesk.

When dealing with angry 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 automation

AI can analyze customer complaints through email and messaging and automatically generate support tickets, complete with customer context. AI agents 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 SLA rules that help keep tickets from slipping through the cracks. AI agents 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, CSAT 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 voice, 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 for Business allows you to meet the customers 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. They keep your teams organized, track complaints from submission to resolution, and glean valuable insights that enable continuous improvement. Here are a few top benefits of complaint management systems.

Identifies trends and gets 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 with a 10x increase in self-service.

Increases customer satisfaction and reduces churn

Using a complaint management solution allows your business to resolve customer complaints quickly and efficiently. Trouble ticketing software 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.

Improves 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 for tickets to reach 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 gives customers the information they need

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 they cause 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 for incomplete orders.

Creates 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 connect with customers and create more engagement opportunities proactively.

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. It’s also crucial to 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.

• Total cost of ownership means the purchase price plus any additional or hidden costs.
• 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.