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Improve Your Customer Service With This Simple Tip
If you deal with customers, eventually you will have an unhappy one. You go through the normal steps common to all customer service issues: you listen without interruption, you empathize, you apologize, you take responsibility, and then you agree on a solution.
But after your customer leaves, you still have an unhappy customer.
The best customer service folks add another step to this formula that makes the difference between good and great service. They imagine the inconvenience the problem has caused the customer, and make sure that inconvenience is solved too.
Here’s an example.
Your customer comes in to pick up a print, and you discover it isn’t the one they originally ordered. “I’m sorry,” you say. “I’ll get a new print made and have it by Friday. When would you like to pick it up?”
Although you may have solved “the problem”, you have inconvenienced the customer by asking them to come in a second time. Imagine how you would feel if you were that customer. Inconvenienced, right?
Instead you could say: “I’ll get a new print made and have it by Friday. Is their a time it would be convenient for me to drop it by your home so you don’t have to make another trip to the studio?”
Obviously, you cannot afford to offer this level of service to every customer. It is hard to cost-justify overnight shipping and rush order charges for even a small order.
But most of the time, going “above and beyond” for a customer will not only keeps them coming back, it will also make it more likely that they will tell their friends about the extraordinary level of service you provide (don’t you feel good when someone goes out of their way for you?). That is the kind of word-of-mouth advertising we can all use in our business.
Do you have any customer complaints you’ve solved brilliantly? Take a second and brag about them in the comments below.
Tags: customer service, word of mouth
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