The current pandemic has clearly highlighted many businesses who care about their customers and continue to provide them with a magical customer excellence. Unfortunately, we all have been exposed to businesses who have not. If you claim to be customer focused, are you sure you’re truly walking the talk? Particularly when responding to your customer’s needs and wants.
Whether you are walking the talk or not, the pandemic has brought many businesses into the spotlight. Particularly on social media sites like twitter. Sometimes, social media will guarantee a quicker response when contacting your own customer service usual channels often results in nothing.
Today, customers expect a response in minutes or hours rather than days. Recent research shows that 88% of customers expect a response from your business within 60 minutes, while 30% expect a response within 15 minutes or less! How good is your own customer experience response rate?
Customers have found that many call centers today are a frustrating and sometimes necessary experience to endure. In many cases, they are automated, with an often long and complex self-selection process of button pushing to arrive at the department one needs – if you are lucky that is!
Usually, the result of all that effort is just a recording that either announces that the department needed is not open at the moment, or that due to Covid-19 the agents are currently busy and to please stay on the line at best, or to call back later most often. Sound familiar?
We are next subjected to music supposedly designed to keep us occupied, engaged or even calm our nerves, spread out with messages suggesting alternatives to waiting on the line: going to the website to find a solution, to check their available FAQs, to complete a contact form, or to send an email. Even worse, to add insult to injury, we might hear the infamous message about our call being important to the business! Really? If so, you’re not showing it and definitely not walking the talk.
Businesses that have understood customers’ frustration with help-line queues have found alternative solutions, such as arranging a callback or providing sufficient staff to cover the busiest times, or at least to be available when the customer is most likely to need support.
Today, there is no excuse for a business to not be ready to help their customers when they need it the most. Don’t give your customers a reason to resort to Twitter as a final cry for help after being frustrated by long waits on your customer care lines, or self-service selections that lead to nowhere.
Make sure you have the right people answering your phones!
As Walt Disney said it best, “It takes people to make the dream a reality.” Employees, answering the phones and putting themselves in the customers shoes is the absolute must thing to do for a business.
- Do you have the right employees who are good listeners and demonstrate customer empathy? Particularly, when subject to your customers frustration and anger at the end of a phone call?
- Have you invested in any ongoing training for your employees who might need help, role playing, sample scripts, suggestions of phrases to use to be consistent?
I conduct many training sessions for businesses who realize the success of any business is only as good as the people you hire and the ongoing training they receive so that they can meet their customer experience expectations.
Here are a few tips, that I recently shared with a client’s call center team, from one of my tailored customer phone experience training programs. Contact me if you have any questions:
- Be Personable: Ask for a call back number to speak to your customer in person. This is a win-win for both the business and the customer. It makes the customer feel important when give them personal attention by calling them right back.
- Be a Good Listener: Let your customer talk first and listen until your customer has finished ranting, or stopped to ask a question. Sometimes being a good listener is all it takes to defuse a potential issue from escalating. Your customer just wants to be understood when sharing negative experiences.
- Be Calm and Patient: Never lose your cool, even when your customer looses theirs. Having the right people or teaching your employees how to remain calm even when the customer is accusing your business or even another employee of exaggerated shortcomings, is essential to know when trying to defuse the emotional tensions of your customer’s issue.
- Be Knowledgeable and Professional: Be the expert by knowing the topic and more importantly how to explain the complex details in simple terms. Your customers don’t want to feel that they know more about the topic than the business representative.
- Be a Problem Solver: Partner with your customers to find solutions that work for all parties. Your objective is not to get the customer to accept the least costly solution. Ask and answer questions until you are sure the customer is happy with everything.
- Be Thankful and Grateful: Be sure to thank your customers that they took the time to share their insight and challenge with you in person. Demonstrate that you are grateful and appreciative for the opportunity to serve them.
Remember, perception is reality. Are you noticing more and more of your customers demonstrating frustration with you, your staff or your business, when experiencing challenging situations? Do your responses appear to be inefficient, non-caring or lazy? If so, you will run the risk of social media exposure by your disgruntle customers or worse, a lost customer. Not very Magical! Need help? Contact John for a FREE Discovery call.