Have you ever wondered why customers enter into a
conversation with our representatives seemingly annoyed? Your agents have
answered a call and it seems as if the customer becomes unreasonable without
the consideration of the agent that is trying to help the customer?
If we look at this from the customer’s perspective, they
often are calling due to a breach of an implied contract. For example, our
company has agreed to provide a service, and somewhere along the way we have not
provided that service to the expectation of the customer. It could be a service
outage, an internal problem at our organization, a mistake on a bill, or a
failure in the technology or equipment we provide. The call center is an
extension of the company and the customer sees us as one. Even though we often
don’t control the service or technology we are seen as one company to the
customer.
Customers are spending their hard earned money with us and
that gives them the right to be annoyed if they don’t receive the value we have
committed to for that money. They are not unreasonable to expect the service
for which they paid. They could be “nice” about it but they have earned the
right to be annoyed with us. I know we often take these negative encounters
personally but it is simply a business discussion.
When a customer has a complaint we must approach it from the
perspective of that customer and the implied contract we have with them if we
expect them to continue to do business with us. We must acknowledge we have
failed in their expectation in order to respect the customer’s concern. I know
this seems basic to many but it must be reaffirmed often in our front line
representatives. After all they are human too and the natural reaction is to be
defensive and respond that it is not our (personal) fault. But it is our fault
because we represent the company.
This response to difficult customers is a very basic lesson
in customer service but one that every one of us as managers must reinforce
every day with our supervisors. When your team puts this simple lesson into
action, and more importantly understands why it is important, your customers
will appreciate it with loyalty. You will be trusted in the customer’s eyes
because you didn’t make any excuses. There are no excuses in customer service
only solutions…
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