Today’s article is from guest author Margaret McCaffrey

A friend of mine recently changed jobs. When I rang to congratulate her on her new position I wondered if I’d swapped planets.

The receptionist at her new job couldn’t have been nicer, indicating in a pleasant tone that they were pleased with their new appointee and that my call was welcome. “Can I check the spelling of your name?” she asked. “Things are looking up,” I thought.

In my friend’s old job there was a labyrinth of departments and hierarchies that I had to wade through in order to make contact. When they finally did track her down, I usually had to settle for leaving her a message on voicemail.

What a difference the first point of call makes.

I realize that management experts make a business of reminding companies of this fact, but I sometimes wonder if the managing director just rang their own office – from an outside line – or visited their shop in search of their own product, they could save themselves a lot in consultancy fees, and improve sales at the same time.

Whether it is service at the make-up counter of a department store, a call to your stockbroker, or an inquiry about train scheduling, it is all the same thing – the first impression creates a lasting impact. People care about how they are treated. Good service - along with fine product - turns an enquirer into a buyer; a browser into a customer.

Customers may not always be right, but my guess is that success in the marketplace goes to the company that makes them think they are - or at least makes them feel good about being wrong.

And besides, if all other forms of persuasion fail, just remember that you never know when the customer on the other end of the phone or on the other side of the counter is going to be your boss.

About the Author:

Margaret McCaffrey is a freelance writer from Melbourne, Australia and a keen observer of human interaction and communication. She is currently researching and writing a book on the relationship between the children of World War II veterans and their fathers, and the impact war has on families.

Have you ever been so busy that your customers start feeling the pain?

This situation may be exacerbated when you have to address some customer service issues. A delay in getting a customer through your queue can leave the others who wait frustrated.

On a recent trip to the grocery store when it came time to pay, my wife was having some trouble with coupons and subsequent questions. The cashier escalated this issue to her manager. The manager then electronically transferred the transaction to another register. My wife and her cart full of groceries, all packed and bagged, left her current cashier and followed the manager to the other station.

The customers that were waiting behind my wife were then able to proceed through the checkout. Simultaneously, the manager assisted my wife and resolved the issue.

The manager here recognized two things. First, the customer (my wife) needed some time and attention. Second, others were stuck waiting for the issue to be resolved.

When you start dealing with customer issues, don’t forget all your other customers! How can you call in backup so you can deal with both the current issue and everyone else that is clamoring for your attention?

After the recent JetBlue customer service nightmare, it appears everyone is talking about customer service. This is a good thing! It is the perfect time for you to evaluate how you handle customer crisis in your business.

When mistakes are made, companies fall into one of three categories. Businesses will:

• Ignore the problem
• Only address the problem if a customer complains
• Proactively identify and correct the problem

Ignore the Problem

To ignore or even deny that a problem has occurred is very dangerous. At best, your customers will abandon you. At worst, they will share their story with the world and you’ll have a public relations fiasco on your hands. When mistakes are made, don’t ignore them! Face them head on.

No Complaints = No Problem

If you never hear from customers about a problem, does that mean you don’t have any problems? No. For every vocal customer that complains, there is a hidden army of silent customers that simply walk away and take their business elsewhere. Only waiting to hear from customers does not give you a realistic view of your operations. Yes, you should handle customer complaints with style, but that can’t be your only policy.

Proactive Customer Service

Business Week magazine this week has a cover story titled “Customer Service Champs.” The opening paragraph of that article highlights Southwest Airlines for their proactive customer service:

Bob Emig was flying home … on Southwest Airlines … when an all-too-familiar travel nightmare began to unfold. After his airplane backed away from the gate, he and his fellow passengers were told the plane would need to be de-iced. When the aircraft was ready to fly two and a half hours later, the pilot had reached the hour limit set by the Federal Aviation Administration, and a new pilot was required. By that time, the plane had to be de-iced again. Five hours after the scheduled departure time, Emig’s flight was finally ready for takeoff.

A customer service disaster, right? Not to hear Emig tell it. The pilot walked the aisles, answering questions and offering constant updates. Flight attendants, who Emig says “really seemed like they cared,” kept up with the news on connecting flights. And within a couple of days of arriving home, Emig, who travels frequently, received a letter from Southwest that included two free round-trip ticket vouchers. “I could not believe they acknowledged the situation and apologized,” says Emig. “Then they gave me a gift, for all intents and purposes, to make up for the time spent sitting on the runway.”

Emig’s “gift” from the airline was … standard procedure for Southwest Airlines, which almost six years ago created a new high-level job that oversees all proactive customer communications with customers. Fred Taylor, who was plucked from the field by President Colleen C. Barrett to fill the role in 2001, coordinates information that’s sent to all frontline reps in the event of major flight disruptions. But he’s also charged with sending out letters, and in many cases flight vouchers, to customers caught in major storms, air traffic snarls, or other travel messes–even those beyond Southwest’s control–that would fry the nerves of a seasoned traveler. “It’s not something we had to do,” says Taylor. “It’s just something we feel our customers deserve.”

In this story, Southwest didn’t wait around to hear about complaints and they surely didn’t ignore problems. They had established company policies to proactively seek out and handle any problems or perceived problems with customers.

Because your customers were dealing with your company at the time things went bad, regardless of whether or not it was your fault, they had a bad experience. To handle a bad situation proactively, you need to handle all problems: both your mistakes and the side effects of events outside of your control.

Uncontrollable circumstances will happen on your watch. Take care of the customer during these times and they will grow into your loyal fan club.

When customers call your company, they often get put on hold. What do they hear?

Is it annoying? Is it something the customer wants to hear?

Have you ever called your company to see what the “on hold” experience is like?

Hold Music

In Call Center Chronicles Episode 1: Nabisco, I endured a few minutes of hold time.

While I waited on the phone, an automated voice would interrupt every so often to say thanks for waiting. After this recorded message, the music would start over. Nabisco played the same tune, same stanzas, and same notes over and over again.

Music is fine for waiting customers but please don’t play a broken record!

Set Expectations

I maintain a website hosted with Hostway. A recent problem required that I call their technical support.

The hold message kept me informed of my progress. As my position in the queue changed, I’d hear this message: “You are caller #13. Current estimated hold time: 6 minutes”

As I progressed towards the front of the line, my wait times and my caller number decreased.

Just like being in a line at a local store, I could clearly see how many people were ahead of me and I could gauge my wait time.

How many times have you called a company, been put on hold, and had no idea how long you’d be stuck there? Hostway solved that problem very effectively and was able to continually set my expectations.

Use Time Wisely

Since most phone systems throw you into a black hole of waiting, imagine your customer’s surprise when they get something different.

Make your goal of the inevitable caller wait time this: ease the customer’s burden. How can you inform, help, educate, or even entertain your customers while they wait to speak with you?

Think of the last time you called a company’s toll free number. You probably were greeted by an automated voice that stated the “call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.”

If my calls are monitored, what happens when I get so frustrated that I hang up? In these cases it should be obvious to an observer that my problem was not solved and that unless something changes, I’m left with a very bad taste in my mouth.

Shouldn’t I get a call back from a manager? Shouldn’t I get an apology? Or better yet, a solution to my problem?

If my call is monitored, it should be easy to review, analyze, and solve my problem before calling me back.

Unfortunately, you’ll never get this follow-up phone call. You’re more likely to get a call from a telemarketer than the company with whom you initiated contact.

Imagine your customer’s surprise if you followed up a bad customer experience with a phone call that solved the problem.

Are you monitoring your communications with customers? If not, pull your head out of the sand!

If you are monitoring, do you take action on the problems you see? Please say “yes!”

Taking action by changing your process, training, or scripts is a good thing. Don’t forget, however, about the customers that took the brunt of your mistakes. Get back to them with a solution.

On a recent business trip, my father ran into some trouble with his hotel room. On the first morning there during his shower, the water went from warm to freezing cold and never returned to normal.

After finishing in cold water and getting ready for the day, he notified the front desk of the problem. They reassured him it would be fixed.

The next day, all seemed fine in the shower but the temperature dropped suddenly. Once again he had to finish in freezing water.

Afterward, Dad went to the front desk and asked to speak to the manager. The clerk at the counter disappeared into the manager’s office. The manager then promptly came out of the office and invited my Dad in to speak with him.

Dad was a little shocked that he was so quickly greeted and even invited into the office. He retold his story of broken maintenance promises and freezing showers. He even told the manager that he wanted to be compensated for his troubles.

The manager didn’t miss a beat and agreed completely. He arranged to have the first few nights’ fees waived, the shower repair really made, and the remainder of his stay billed at a discounted rate.

This manager did a great job resolving my father’s concerns and refunding him for the problems. However, this was all set up by the fact that the manager was available and accessible.

Are you accessible to your customers?

If you’re the boss or owner of a business, how hard is it to reach you? Can customers request to speak with you in person? Via phone? What about posting your email address on your website?

The closer you are to the customer, the better you’ll be able to respond to customer needs as you guide the company’s direction.

Don’t isolate yourself or get too far removed from the people you serve: the customers.

Do you think your automated phone system or website is smart enough to accurately identify your customers?

You may be able to identify the person (name, customer id, etc.) but you’ll have a much harder time guessing what they need.

Take, for example, my recent call with Dell. I called up tech support for help. Dell’s automated phone system some how automatically determined I wanted to talk about my Axim handheld.

Sure, I had bought an Axim from them before. However, my most recent purchase was a desktop computer.

How did I end up in the PDA support queue when I really had a problem with my desktop computer?

I found myself trapped without any option besides hanging up the phone.

Just because a person has previously purchased a product doesn’t mean that is what they want to talk to you about.

In customizing and personalizing our user’s experience we must be careful that we don’t go overboard.

Guessing the user’s next step is important but we need to be confident our decision will correctly match the customer the majority of the time.

Depending on your circumstance you may be able to be more or less strict on your accuracy. This is determined by the consequences of being wrong.

Always give your customer an escape route. If you’re making choices for them, make sure they can override you, take a step back, or even start over.

Lesson #1: Don’t guess wrong.

Lesson #2: If you guess wrong, make the recovery easy. Don’t trap the customer where they don’t want to be.

I host some online projects with Liquid Web. I called them one evening this week to ask some questions and get some issues resolved.

When I got off the call, I told my wife, “That was the best tech support phone call I’ve ever made.”

She responded, rather shocked, “You were on the phone with tech support? I never would have known.

“What do you mean?”

She explained: “Well, with tech support calls, you usually get an aggressive tone and gradually get louder and more frustrated as the call progresses.”

She’s right. Most tech support calls I make end in frustration. Where others have failed, Liquid Web succeeded. How?

The support person made the entire call a very comfortable experience. Liquid Web and my support representative excelled in several key elements:

Availability and Accessibility

I made my call after regular business hours. Often times you’ll have to wait for the next business day to get a hold of companies. In time-critical businesses, web hosting in this case, you need to be there for your customers.

After a few automated phone tree questions, I was routed directly to a support person. No wait. No endless hold music.

Communications

The girl I spoke with could have been the girl who lives down the street. There was no thick accent or language barriers. Imagine how comfortable customers will be when they can feel like they are talking to a neighbor. Localize your support.

No Rush

I was able to make it through my call with Liquid Web without being rushed off the line. Because I wasn’t feeling pressure to finish, I was able to better collect my thoughts and get all my issues resolved.

If your customer is in a hurry, feel the urgency and make things happen. However, you should never rush the customer just to get through the transaction. Customer throughput will affect your margins but you need to carefully balance customer care with operational efficiency.

Customized Support

At one point my support representative asked if I was comfortable doing something myself. I said “not really” and so she walked me through one task and completed another for me.

Your customers will have varying skills and abilities. Find out what they know or can do and tailor your response accordingly. If you know the customer doesn’t know, you can make things as easy as possible. Experienced customers getting simple instructions will take less offense than novice customers getting complicated mumbo-jumbo.

Read the previous issues of Call Center Chronicles:

• Episode 1: Nabisco
• Episode 2: Current

My wife recently ordered some greeting cards from Current. One package of 30 cards only had 29.

Lesson #1: Lack of quality control will lead to more overhead in supporting customers after the sale.

Lesson #2: It is fine to work on improving customer service but don’t neglect the root causes of problems. Fixing those up front will alleviate a lot of the downstream issues you face everyday.

To solve her problem, my wife called Current’s phone number on the shipping invoice.

An automated message greeted her:

Due to high call volume, please call back in 1-2 hours.

She called back a few more times over the next week and got the same message every time.

Lesson #3: Don’t leave the follow-up to the customer. If you’re too busy to help a customer right now, they need alternatives or a proactive, scheduled response from you later. If you leave it up to the customer, they may walk away disgruntled and unsatisfied. Not everyone is as persistent as my wife!

Frustrated, my wife pulled up her order confirmation email. This had a different phone number that actually got her through to the company.

Lesson #4: Be consistently reachable. Ideally, you’d have one phone number that everyone can use to reach you. In reality, you may have several different phone numbers. These may be for different departments or even so you can track the source of incoming calls. No matter how many phone numbers you publish on the web, in emails, or your packaging, they better all work and connect customers to you!

After my wife explained the situation to the Current representative, she was told:

I can take care of that for you.

Lesson #5: Let your employees solve customer problems. If they have to defer to others or need approval to appease the customer, precious time and effort is wasted.

My wife was told:

Sorry, we’re out of stock of that item right now. What I can do is offer you a $2 coupon off your next purchase. Would that be OK?

Lesson #6: Focus on what the customer wants to hear. Tom Vander Well lists several things you should never say to a customer. Most of these include telling the customer “no” or “I can’t.” So tell them what you can do, keep it positive and work towards a solution.

My wife was happy with the coupon and the problem was solved. We’ll surely shop with them again especially since we now have a coupon beckoning us to buy.

Lesson #7: Not all problems can be solved with a coupon for future purchases. Your customer may be so mad they don’t want anything to do with you again and just want a refund. That’s fine because in this situation, a coupon may just be a slap in the face. Be sure to adjust your response based on the customer’s situation and attitude.

Read the previous issue of Call Center Chronicles, Episode 1: Nabisco

Last week I headed to Office Depot to buy a wireless card for my computer. Glancing at the shelf, I saw a model I liked. The big yellow price card on that shelf listed a sale price with which I was happy.

I grabbed the box and proceeded to the checkout. The total price showed the regular price and not the discounted sales amount. I protested that the card should be on sale according to price sticker on shelf.

Another employee appeared after the cashier called for a price check. I walked him to the row and showed him the sales price right below my desired network card.

The employee says: “Oh, this sale ended last week.” He then took the sales card down and said, “It looks they they forgot to take these down when they put up the new ones,” pointing to several other yellow tags.

Lesson 1: It is OK to admit you or your company made a mistake.

He offered a weak: “Are you just looking for any networking card?”

Lesson 2: Recover from mistakes by offering the customers options. You can always ask the customer what she wants or have a set backup plan for such occasions. If you don’t act, the customer will have to do it for you. This could mean they leave without a purchase, or ask for something you can’t give.

I responded: “Will you honor the posted price?”

Lesson 3: Why did I have to ask? Be proactive in making amends with customers.

Employee: “Just a minute.”

He returned to say that yes, indeed they would honor the price. He then walked back with me to the cashier and assisted in the transaction. He apologized for the inconvenience as he left me to pay for my purchase.

Lesson 4: Don’t lose a customer over a few dollars. The future value of a repeat customer is worth more than the difference in a posted versus actual price.

The end result was that I was happy and saved a few dollars even though the process could have gone a bit smoother. Nevertheless, Office Depot did perform better this time than on my previous encounters with their bad products and call center problems.