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How To Improve Customer Service
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Article 5: Empower Your Employees
You probably can’t be at your business every minute of every day. You’ll leave for lunch, to meet a client or make a bid for future work. What happens when a problem arises while you’re gone?
If for no other reason, that’s reason enough to empower employees to solve customer problems, within parameters you set. When an irritated customer can get an issue resolved on the spot, you’ll probably keep his business.
It also means your policies shouldn’t be so rigid that exceptions can’t be made for sensible reasons. “That’s a really good way to lose a customer,” notes Karen Leland, co-author of “Customer Service for Dummies” (For Dummies, 1999).
Leland recalls the day she stopped shopping at one of her favorite clothing stores. She bought a blouse at an “all sales final” event. The next day she found a tear in the blouse and tried to return it. The clerk refused to make an exception to the no-return policy even though the garment was defective.
“Guess what?” Leland says. “She lost a customer who spent several hundred dollars a year in her store. She should have asked what was reasonable here.”
As Leland points out, it’s worth it to take a small hit to keep a customer.
“What’s the lifetime value of your customer?” she asks, noting that a mere $100 in sales annually is $1,000 over a decade. “Are you going to make a $5 problem an issue compared with the $1,000? And that doesn’t even include all the people they influence positively or negatively based on how you handle their complaint.”
Tell employees how you would resolve various issues, then let them apply that philosophy to new situations.
And stand behind their decisions, even if you don’t agree with them. Few things will chill employee initiative as quickly as standing on a limb and having it cut off behind them.
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