There must be a billion words written about customer service. Advice abounds, from the banal and obvious (smile when you talk on the phone) to complex and difficult suggestions about how to “create a corporate culture of excellent customer service.” Amidst all of the words, simple or fancy, is hidden a basic truth about customer service: the person who interacts directly with the customer determines whether that customer perceives that he or she is receiving poor customer service, excellent service, or something in between. If you serve customers directly, you have the power to affect their perceptions. That customer contact is where “the rubber meets the road.”
If you provide service to customers, your words and behaviors are the tools you use to create a positive customer perception of you and the company you work for. Whether you are a novice working with customers or a seasoned pro, what you do and say will affect how customers see you. You can’t help it.
Customers will form opinions, so you might as well learn how to create positive opinions. But you need to know how to Do this. That’s what this book is for—to teach you about the dozens and dozens of techniques you can use when interacting with customers so they will walk away with positive feelings about the experience. You’ll learn about very specific things you can do or say in all kinds of customer interactions. You’ll learn how to deal with difficult customers. You’ll learn how to approach customers and how to get information from them so you can do your job. You’ll learn to deal with customer service problems quickly, efficiently, and professionally. Best of all, the techniques will fit your needs, whether you serve burgers, staff the desk in a hotel, help people in health care environments, or even work in government.
This site will tell you exactly what to do and say and it will provide you with numerous examples so you can use customer service techniques effectively. Let’s get started!
What’s in It for Me?
Why should you be concerned with providing excellent customer service? You don’t own the company. You may not get paid more for providing excellent customer service. So, what’s in it for you?
There are three powerful reasons for learning to provide great customer service: greater job satisfaction, reduced stress and hassle, and enhanced job success.
First, very few people can derive any job satisfaction when they feel that the time they spend at work is “wasted.” Most of us need to feel useful and productive—to make a difference, whether it’s helping a fast food customer make healthier food choices or dispensing legal advice. When you provide high-quality customer service, you feel that you are making that difference and can derive pride in your work. When you do a good job with a customer, such as calming down someone who is angry and complaining, you feel good about having achieved something. But perhaps more important than your own perceptions is the customer’s perceptions, when you do a good job with a customer and he or she tells you what you have achieved. That feedback really helps you feel good about yourself and the job you’re doing. Doing a good job and taking pride in your customer service accomplishments is a way to prevent job burnout.
Second, learning to deliver quality customer service will save you a lot of stress and hassle. When you learn and use customer service skills, you are far less likely to get into protracted, unpleasant, and upsetting interactions with a customer. You make yourself less of a target for customer wrath. That’s because customer service skills help keep customers from becoming angry and help reduce the length and intensity of the anger when and if difficult customer service situations occur.
Third, learning and using quality customer service techniques helps form the perceptions of those who may be able to help your career—supervisors, managers, and even potential employers. Using them makes you look good to everyone: that’s critical in getting promoted, receiving pay raises, and getting new job opportunities. Managers and supervisors tend to notice when customers ask for you specifically because you do such a good job or contact them to provide positive comments about how you’ve helped.
Of course, you may have other reasons to want to provide the best customer service possible. You may want to contribute to the success of your employer. You may like the feeling of having other employees look up to you as a good model. Or you may even benefit directly if you work on a commission basis; people who are good at customer service do earn more.
Regardless of your reasons, you can learn how to use quality customer service techniques and serve your customers better. We’ll provide an overview of customer service principles and issues and explain how to use and we’ll describe 60 techniques you should be using.
Different Kinds of Customers
Before we continue, we should clarify what the word “customer” means. You are probably familiar with our starting definition: the customer is the person who pays for goods or services that you provide. This definition works in some contexts, but not all. It breaks down in situations where money does not directly change hands. For example, people often interact with government, public schools, and other organizations: they receive goods or services from them, but do not pay anything directly to them. We need to change our definition so that people who interact with these organizations fall under our definition of customer, since they, too, deserve high-quality customer service, even if they are not paying directly.
Here’s a better definition: the customer is the person next in line who receives your output (service, products). That person may purchase goods or services directly or receive output you create or deliver without direct payment. The person may be outside your company, but this definition also includes anyone within the company who receives output from you.
Let’s be more specific. There are four basic types of customer. Regardless of type, each customer deserves to receive top-quality customer service. Also, regardless of the type of customer, you and your organization will benefit by providing top-quality customer service.
First, there are external paying customers. These are the people who pay to eat in a restaurant, pay for health care and legal advice, or pay to stay in a hotel.
Second, there are internal customers. These are people who receive output (services, products, information) that you create or provide, but who are in the same organization. Internal customers may sometimes be billed via interdepartmental charge systems or there may be no payment system in place. For example, human resources staff involved in hiring employees are, in effect, working on behalf of internal customers (the managers of the work units needing new employees). The technician who maintains company computers is working for internal customers (the people who use the computers he or she maintains).
Third, there are external nonpaying customers. These customers receive services, goods, or other outputs but do not pay directly for them. For example, the tourist who visits a traveler’s information kiosk by the highway may receive tourist information (outputs) and maps (goods), but is not paying directly. That tourist is a customer. Another example is the parent who attends the parent-teacher meeting at the local public school: he or she receives outputs and services from the teacher, but does not pay the teacher directly. That parent needs to be treated like a customer, too.
That brings us to the fourth type of customer, regulated customers. Government organizations often interact with people in ways that are not oriented toward providing something to individuals, but are instead toward regulating them for the common good. It might seem like people regulated by the government through licenses, zoning regulations, permits, and other controls are really not customers. But we want to include them, because even though government is regulating them, they still deserve the best possible levels of customer service. Including this group under the term “customer” reminds us (and, hopefully, government employees) that even when employees are telling people what to do or what they are allowed to do, they need to do so applying principles of customer service.
First Things First—Dispelling an Important
Customer Service Myth
We need to address the single most popular false idea about customer service. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase, “The customer is always right.” It’s a great slogan, credited to H. Gordon Selfridge, who passed away in 1947. Unfortunately, it’s wrong and misleading.
Clearly the customer is not always right. Customers make unreasonable requests and sometimes have unreasonable expectations. Sometimes customers play fast and loose with the truth. Customers may not understand your company and what you can and can’t do for them.
Practically speaking, you can’t operate under the assumption that the customer is always right. You can’t give each customer what he or she asks for.
So, can we come up with a phrase or two that realistically describe how we should treat customers? Yes. Here are two short phrases that fit the bill.
■ The customer always deserves to be treated as if he or she is important and his or her opinions, needs, and wants are worthy of listening to.
■ The customer deserves to receive maximum effort on the part of those serving him or her, even when the customer’s expectations, wants, and needs may be impractical.
Since the customer isn’t “always right” and it’s often not possible to give the customer what he or she wants, what are the implications for customer service?
It’s simple. Customers have other important wants and needs. Even in situations where you can’t do what the customer asks, you can contribute to the customer’s development of a positive impression about how he or she is treated. That’s what we’ve captured in the two phrases above. We need to focus not only on what we provide to the customer, but on how we provide it.
That’s the key to realistic excellent customer service. To do that, you need to understand these other wants and needs—and that’s where we are going to go next.
Understanding What Customers Want
One thing about the customer service techniques you are going to learn: you can’t succeed with them by memorizing them or using them in every situation. The key to customer service is doing the right thing at the right time. To be able to choose the right techniques and to use them effectively, you have to understand what customers want.
Knowing this will help you make sense of the techniques you’ll be looking at. Below is a list of the most important customer wants and needs. When you address these, you create positive customer perceptions about you and your company, which means fewer arguments, fewer hassles,and better customer relationships.
■problem solved
■effort
■acknowledgment and understanding
■choices and options
■positive surprises
■consistency, reliability, and predictability
■value (not necessarily best price)
■reasonable simplicity
■speed
■confidentiality
■sense of importance
Customers want their problem solved. They want to get what they want from you, whether it’s a product, service, or other output.
This is the customer service “want” that most people are familiar with. However, it’s not always possible to give the customer what he or she wants, which is where the rest of the “wants” come in. Even if you can’t solve the customer’s problem, you can create positive perceptions by addressing the other, less obvious customer wants.
Customers expect that you (and your company) will make an effort to address their problems, concerns, and needs, even if you can’t give them what they want. Customers respect effort, often pay attention to effort above and beyond the call of duty, and will turn on you (create hassles) if they sense that you are not making an effort. Many of the techniques you will learn later in this book work because they demonstrate “effort above and beyond the call of duty.”
Customers want and expect to have their wants, needs, expectations, feelings, and words acknowledged and understood.
That means listening and proving to the customer that you have “got” what he or she is saying. Customers who feel understood and acknowledged feel important: that’s a vital part of good customer relationships.
Customers also want to feel they have choices and options and are not trapped by you or your company. They want to feel they are making the decisions and that you are helping them, rather than the other way around. When customers feel helpless or powerless, they tend to more likely become frustrated, angry, and aggressive.
Customers also appreciate “positive surprises.” Positive surprises are things you may do that go above and beyond their hopes and expectations (going the extra five miles).They include offering discounts or providing some other benefit that is normally not available to them. Positive surprises are most useful when dealing with difficult or angry customers.
Consistency, reliability, and predictability are also important customer wants. Customers expect that you will treat them in a consistent way and that you will do what you say you will do each and every time. By acting in accordance with these wants, you provide the customer with a sense of security and confidence in you personally and in the company. This builds loyalty.
Customers also expect value for their investments of time and money. What’s interesting here is that while money (price) is part of the value equation, it is only a part. When customers look at value, they also take into account how they are treated, the quality and expertise of the advice they receive from you to help them make decisions, and a number of other factors. You may not be able to affect the price of services or products you provide, but you can add value by helping the customer in other ways.
Reasonable simplicity is also an important customer want. These days many people are overwhelmed by a complex world. If you complicate the customers’ world or make them jump through a number of hoops, they will become frustrated and angry. One of the your customer service roles should be to make things easier for the customer, not more complicated, without oversimplifying or treating the customers in a condescending way.
Speed and prompt service are also important wants on the part of customers. At minimum, they want you to make the effort to help them quickly and efficiently. They also expect that you will not create situations that have them waiting around unnecessarily.
While you may not always be able to control how fast a customer is served, you can convey a sense that you are working at top speed.
Confidentiality is an important aspect of customer service.
Clearly customers want you to keep their sensitive information to yourself, but it goes further than that. Customers may also want some degree of privacy even when talking to you about what may seem to be a mundane or non-sensitive issue.
Customers may feel uncomfortable if there are other staff or other customers crowding around them.
We’ve left the most important need for last. Customers need the sense that they are important. Many of the above wants tie into this. Listening to and acknowledging customers demonstrates that you believe they are important. So does arranging for pleasant surprises or making an effort. Many of the specifi
For Those Wanting to Help Others Learn Customer Service Skills
Managers, supervisors, and trainers may want to use this book as a basis for training others in customer service skills. The design of this book makes it easy to do so, since it’s short, concise, and modular. Learners need not be exposed to the entire book at one time or in one training session; individual skills can be covered quickly, even in short lunch time meetings or staff meetings.
Even those not considering training others may want to visit this free site, since it contains numerous resources you may find useful in enhancing your own customer service skills.
Time to look at the tools of customer service—the things you can do and say to deal effectively with customer service situations that run from the basic and simple to the very challenging and difficult.
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