Customer Service

Customer service is the work of supporting customers before, during and after a purchase: answering questions, fixing problem orders, handling returns and warranties, and taking complaints. In Vietnam it is usually called “chăm sóc khách hàng” (customer care), or CSKH for short. For many brands, it’s the moment a customer actually talks to a real person at the company.

What is customer service?

A customer service team typically covers several channels at once: a hotline, email, website chat, the Facebook fanpage inbox, Zalo OA (the business account on Zalo, Vietnam’s most widely used messaging app), chat inside Shopee or TikTok Shop, and the counter in a physical store. Before a purchase, the team advises and explains policies. During it, they confirm orders and report delivery status. After it, they deal with returns, warranties and complaints.

Customer service is only one part of the brand experience. A customer can love the ad and still walk away after a chat that went unanswered for two days.

Why should marketing care?

The ad money spent to win a new customer is already gone by the time that customer needs help. If poor service means they never come back, that spend isn’t recovered through a second or third order, and your retention rate drops with it.

Most feedback now happens in public. On Google Business Profile, verified businesses can reply to reviews. The reply appears publicly under the business name, the reviewer gets a notification and can still edit their review after reading it (Google Business Profile Help, accessed October 2026). Every reply is also marketing content for whoever reads it later.

Legal obligations in Vietnam since July 2024

Vietnam’s Law on Protection of Consumer Rights No. 19/2023/QH15 took effect on July 1, 2024. Article 31 requires businesses and individual traders to:

• Set up a way to receive and resolve consumer feedback, requests and complaints.
• Notify the consumer that the complaint has been received within 3 working days.
• For manufacturers, importers and direct sellers: build and publish a receiving and resolution procedure, post it at the place of business and on the website or app (if any). This particular requirement doesn’t apply to individual traders who aren’t required to register, or to micro-enterprises.

Source: Law No. 19/2023/QH15, Article 31, on LuatVietnam, issued June 2023. An unmonitored fanpage inbox is therefore a legal risk as well.

AI chatbots: what do customers think?

Gartner surveyed 5,728 customers in December 2023. 64% said they would prefer companies not use AI in customer service, and 53% would consider switching to a competitor if they learned a company planned to use AI for it. The biggest worry was that it would be harder to reach a person, ahead of AI taking jobs and AI giving wrong answers (Gartner, July 2024). A chatbot is fine for repetitive questions, as long as the button to reach a human is always easy to find.

Example (hypothetical)

A cosmetics brand selling through its website and TikTok Shop gets 3,000 orders a month, and 2% of orders lead to a complaint: 60 customers. Assume it costs 150,000 VND in advertising to acquire one new customer. If all 60 leave because complaints were handled slowly, the brand loses about 9 million VND of ad spend every month.

Customer service vs CX vs CRM

Frequently asked questions

Do micro-enterprises have to comply with Article 31?

Yes. The only exemption is the requirement to build and publish the procedure.

Should you reply to bad reviews publicly?

Yes, and keep it short: own the mistake if there was one, explain the next step, and invite the customer to a private channel. Don’t argue in public.

If you want to see how reviews and customer feedback are affecting your ad performance on marketplaces, Adtek’s Brand Commerce team can talk it through with you via our contact page.