|
 Print Friendly
 Email to Friend
|
|
How To Improve Customer Service
|
|
Article 8: Regain Angry Customers
No matter how hard you try, you will have unhappy customers. A service call won’t fix the problem. Merchandise will be defective. Customers will have short tempers.
That’s when you learn how strong your commitment to customer service truly is, because an important component is turning around an unhappy customer who was prepared to walk away.
“Not wanting to deal with unhappy customers is a bad attitude. People make mistakes, and what you do to get the customer back makes the difference,” asserts Ken Colburn, whose Arizona-based Data Doctors Computer Services operates computer repair franchises.
Colburn says that most unhappy customers can be mollified if business owners have developed detailed processes to deal with complaints well in advance of incidents.
“Businesses that haven’t spent time to create a very specific process think you can’t please everyone,” he says. While that’s reality, “that mindset—which comes from the top—is a slow cancer that eats away at your business” Colburn says. “Employees take on the same attitude and when there’s a problem with a customer, they throw them in the bucket of ‘difficult people.’”
For example, Karen Leland co-author of “Customer Service for Dummies” (For Dummies, 1999) would have been appeased if a clothing store she frequented had cheerfully exchanged a torn blouse. When the store wouldn’t exchange the blouse, Leland, promptly boycotted the store, where she previously spent hundreds of dollars a year.
“An angry client is a vocal client,” points out Jennifer Kalita, lead consultant with Washington, D.C.’s Kalita Group, which provides consulting and other services to entrepreneurs. “When you disappoint them, they will talk—loudly. It makes a huge impact. If there are 20 unhappy people walking around, you will really feel the hit. There’s another entrepreneur waiting to scoop them up.”
So let them vent. Listen. Apologize. Make sure your tone of voice carries sincerity and not your own anger. Contact them in a few days to make sure the situation is truly resolved. “Trying to resolve mistakes,” Colburn says, “is where you learn better customer service.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
