Customers get upset. They get upset for lots of reasons. There will be situations where the customer is angry and totally wrong. There will be many more times when they are upset for a good reason. The one thing you can count on is that when they get upset there is a good chance they will call or contact you and it won’t be pleasant.
Many of my clients ask me to deliver training to their teams and staff on “How to Deal With Difficult Customers and Make The Experience Magical”. One of the issues we tackle during the training session is to discuss that regardless of whether the customer is right or wrong, what are you possibly doing to make them upset in the first place? What policies, employee actions or lack of actions, systems or turn of events have caused your customer to be pushed over the edge and be so upset? We usually come up with a few causes. The goal is to eliminate those issues in the first place.
Here are a few of the top seven causes. Which one of these sound familiar to you that might possibly affect the customer experience?
- Can’t get through to you or someone else when they need help.
- No call back or return email.
- Failure to respond to issues quickly.
- Broken promises.
- Failure to keep deadlines. (not very dependable)
- Same issue keeps happening again and again.
- Instead of listening, you or your staff go on the defensive and try to prove the customer wrong.
Do you see a pattern here? These are all issues you can control and have little to do with your product or service. The fact is almost all of these can be removed if you just provided a quick response and be dependable. Think about it. Aren’t these the same situations that would cause you to be upset too?
What is important to understand is when customers consistently experience you or your business as inaccessible, someone who is slow to respond and not dependable, it erodes any trust you have established. Trust is the foundation on which all relationships are built and one of the keys to creating customer loyalty for life. Without trust, your customers feel like you don’t care. If you don’t care why should the customer care to continue to do business with you?
Customers are people. They are not companies, objects, things or a line in your company’s financial statement. They are real people and have feelings and emotions. The most important thing to remember is that customers justify their loyalty primarily based on how you deal with their feelings and emotions. Remind your team everyday on how are we are making our customers feel? Create positive feelings and you will build a business that is Magical!