Seems to be a lot of mistakes being made in the customer service-o-sphere of late, so I thought I’d jump on the chance to help us all learn how-to and how-not-to.
For a few days, I’ll post about one particular mistake and see if some of you can add some advice to the fix.
Todays customer service blunder is:
I’m not a true believer in that old saying about the customer always being right, but they are always the customer and they just might be right.
Never, never, never try to out argue the customer. You might be fighting with bad info and that would make you unarmed, in actuality.
Just because someone in your company told you something, that may or may not make it the truth. Your coworkers are not infallible and some may be plain old stupid or liars.
Don’t try to out scream, outwit or outmaneuver a customer.
Take all their info, their concerns, their contact info and give them a time when you’ll have all the info you need to make an intelligent decision and get back with them.
If you cannot make a decision by the appointed time, call them and tell them so. Never let a deadline go by without communicating with the customer.
When you no longer need customers, then and only then can you get away with telling them to take their business elsewhere.
In todays market, you take a real chance that they might have a blog or newsletter that goes out to 50,000 people that will listen to their one-sided view of the situation and you just lost 50,000 potential customers.
A lot, let’s say the majority, of middle managers, let’s call them the great unwashed and foolish ones, are too stupid to even fathom this and will let their customer service personnel be rude and condecending to customers. The marketing department has no idea and the sales force can’t understand why they can’t sell icewater in the desert.
If your company is struggling to make any headway in your market, maybe you should hire someone to be a customer of your company and tell you what they run into when dealing with your customer service.
A lot of times, all it takes is a very basic approach like this to find the root of your failure to grow.
Sometimes word-of-mouth badvertising will override any and all efforts you make to grow your company.
Believe me, you can tell a customer to shove it, but they’ll tell a helluva lot more people than you can ever imagine and then those people will tell some people and those people will tell some people and those ……..
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