September/October 2006
Customer service—good or bad—is the stuff of legend. Many people have heard the (untrue) tale of the Neiman Marcus cookie: A woman enjoys a chocolate-chip cookie at the department store’s café and asks the chef for the recipe. The chef says it will cost “two-fifty,” and later she finds a $250 charge on her credit-card statement that the company refuses to refund. She gets revenge by e-mailing the recipe to everyone she knows.
Conversely, a legend about Nordstrom reinforces the company’s customer-service reputation. As the story goes, a man walks into a Nordstrom with a set of tires and tells the clerk he’d like to return them for a refund. Even though Nordstrom has never sold tires, the clerk asks him how much he paid, opens the register, and gives him the refund.
People spread word of their bad customer experiences more widely than their good ones, research has shown. Good customer service can help a business stay on customers’ good sides. You might think you have good customer service because you give customers what they want. That’s a reactive approach, and it results in adequate service. Truly good service is proactive—it anticipates what customers might want and gives it to them before they can even think of it themselves.
Customer Service Basics
Customers are not only those who buy products or services from your company. Though external customers get a lot of attention, a company cannot get anything done if its internal customers—all the people working together in the business—are unhappy. Use the same strategies whether the person you’re assisting is in the next office or on another continent.
Start with the basics: All customers expect and deserve good listening and questioning, good intentions, and empathy. They want you to be friendly and fair, and they want control of the situation, which you can give them by offering options or alternatives. They want you to follow through on your promises with prompt action.
How can a customer tell if you have good intentions, empathy, and friendliness? Often it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. About 55 percent of what we learn about others comes from body language; 38 percent comes from voice tone, speed, and inflection; and only 7 percent comes from the actual words used. I test this with my dog, Maggie, by standing in front of her, smiling, and telling her in a sing-song voice that she is the ugliest dog I have ever seen. She gets very excited and wags her tail because for Maggie, body language and tone are almost all she understands. This works with babies, too, but think twice before you call someone’s baby ugly, even if you do it in a happy, smiling way. Babies recognize tone well before they recognize language.
In the presence of a customer, good body language means eye contact, good posture, focus, a neat appearance, and a respect for the customer’s personal space.
Out-of-Sight Service
That’s great, you might say, but we conduct most of our business over the phone. Believe it or not, body language is important in phone interactions. When someone smiles while talking on the phone, the smile can be heard in the person’s voice. Someone sitting up straight sounds better than someone slouching, too.
Tone and inflection take on even greater importance in phone interactions. Try this exercise: Say “Please take out the garbage” three different ways, and emphasize a different word each time. See how the tone changes? If you don’t understand tone, spend a few days with a teenager or a sarcastic adult—someone who can give a word like “OK” a dozen different inflections.
The person answering the phone is the caller’s first impression of your company. Train employees on your phone rules and expectations: how many rings are acceptable before someone answers, what the person answering the phone should say, and how to speak with the customers. Simple courtesies, such as using the customer’s name during the conversation and avoiding slang, can help an employee develop rapport with a customer over the phone.
When I’m training people, I recommend that they ask callers what they would like. For example, “Joe is unavailable right now, would you like to leave a message on his voice mail?” Most people will say yes, but some might want to speak with someone else, and others might want to send an e-mail instead. You don’t know unless you ask. That’s
a much more customer-friendly strategy than just saying “hold on” and transferring the call right into voice mail.
A company that does a lot of business by e-mail might want to have additional rules for that medium. E-mail takes away the cues people get from body language and tone, so it’s especially important that the words are clear and unambiguous. Good manners and good grammar are as important in an e-mail as they are in person and on the phone.
Responding to Complaints
Even with good service, things can go wrong. You might miss a deadline, provide the wrong product, or not follow up on something. The customer might be unhappy with your product or feel he has been treated unfairly. If the customer complains, be appreciative of the feedback. Most people don’t bother, they just take their business elsewhere. A scrap company might never know that there’s been a problem until it gets the dreaded “pick up only” call, which usually means that a competitor has replaced it.
Not every customer complaint is valid, however, and there is a time to draw the line. Often, the problems come from the same customers over and over, who make requests that get harder and harder to accommodate. It becomes clear that they are just abusing the process. Do your employees know at what point they should say “no,” or how to communicate that gracefully? This is an aspect of customer-service training that most companies neglect.
When I provide customer service training, I work with the management team to identify the company’s service flaws and replace them with good manners and clear procedures. When you realize that it takes five times more energy, resources, and money to get a new customer than it does to maintain a current one, you might decide such training is worth the investment.
—Judy Ferraro is president of Judy Ferraro & Associates, a sales development and training company based in the Chicago area. She has more than 30 years of professional sales experience, including more than 20 years in the scrap industry. As a hobby, Ferraro worked in Chicago’s improv and stand-up comedy circuit for several years. Her approach to sales training combines sales techniques with listening skills while making sure everyone has a few laughs during the process. Reach her at 630/243-6860 or judy@judyferraro.com.
Customer service—good or bad—is the stuff of legend. Many people have heard the (untrue) tale of the Neiman Marcus cookie: A woman enjoys a chocolate-chip cookie at the department store’s café and asks the chef for the recipe. The chef says it will cost “two-fifty,” and later she finds a $250 charge on her credit-card statement that the company refuses to refund. She gets revenge by e-mailing the recipe to everyone she knows.