Effective Communication

Writing about people who work in the customer service industry, site contributor Andy Hanselman points out that its often easier to stick to a prepared script than to think and use your initiative.

In other words, whenever you're confronted with a query or a complaint that has the slightest smell of some similar case that you have handled sometime in the past, the automatic pilot in your brain immediately takes over. Without giving the matter a second thought (you don't want to die of over-exercise, do you?), you churn out, parrot-like, the same response that you gave on countless previous occasions.

And of course, since you've temporarily disabled an otherwise very nimble brain, you don't take into account that there might be certain critical differences in this case. This could have unfortunate consequences, as Andy explains.

On the other hand, the best of customer service people know that sometimes the brain just shuts down automatically, and it's not because of apathy, neglect, or any conscious decision on your part.

This happens when get a call or a visit from an irate customer who claims to be hopping mad (and backs up his claim with every inch of his body), because your product or service isn't worth tuppence, you sold it to him under false pretenses, you and your company are a bunch of swindlers, or whatever.

Now, if you do manage to keep reasonably calm when this sort of thing happens, we do have some excellent tips to help you come out tops in such a situation.

But very often, it's not quite so simple. Somehow, you perceive of the irate customer's vicious assault as a personal attack on your integrity. Your emotions take over the show. You feel so hurt that your just can't think straight. Your brain shuts down. The temptation to return fire with fire is overwhelming. You might give as good as you get, return rudeness with rudeness, or just walk away or slam the telephone receiver down.

And of course, that's not good.

Watch this short video (below) from Telephonedoctor.com . With a little imagination, I believe the skills discussed can be applied in other situations, too.

And have a good day, and good week.

Labels: customer service

Stumble It!

When you're getting terrible customer service, opines veteran entrepreneur and columnist Norm Brodsky, don't be so quick to blame the company official you happen to be dealing with at the time.

In many cases, he says, the poor guy's employer is the one at fault, and he tells an interesting story - against himself - to prove his point.

And like many stories of this nature, it just could be that the lesson to be learned from it is relevant not only to the world of business, but can be applied to other areas of life as well.

Brodsky runs an archive-retrieval business. When customers ask to have boxes delivered to their offices, they charge a regular delivery fee plus a surcharge for priority service. As to be expected in any business, disputes over the charges arose from time to time. When Brodsky saw that a couple of his customer-services reps were giving in too easily, he made a rule: no credits could be issued without the approval of someone in management.

What happened then? Occasionally a customer placed a rush order and, for whatever reason, the box didn't arrive on time. In other words, there was nothing to talk about: the company was unmistakeably at fault.

An angry customer would call up and say: "Because it was late, we couldn't make any use of this stuff. You guys can stand on your head, but I'm not paying."

"I'm sorry," the customer-service person would reply, "we made the delivery and you have to pay for it." When the customer would continue to insist "Nothing doing!", the rep would say, "Well, you'll have to speak to a manager."

No question, the manager would waive the charge after hearing the story, but the damage would have already been done. Bad enough that the delivery was late, but the customer sees that they would have been charged for it anyway had no one complained. Then to top it all, he had to waste time arguing with a rpresentative of the company before he was transferred to a manager who cancelled the bill.

So the customer would go away thinking. "That damn service stinks!", and the company would consider themselves lucky if they ever heard from him again.

Thus, the rule that Brodsky laid down came back to haunt him. He now quickly grasped that establishing a rule to eliminate costly errors was not the right response. Among other drawbacks, good, faithful customers were being penalized for the sake of the one or two who tried to take advantage. A few employees with questionable judgement were tying the hands of perhaps the majority whose judgement was perfectly sound.

Now, he has adopted a completely different approach to the sticky problem of well-meaning but inexperienced employees who were a little too looose in passing credit. The real solution, he realized, lay in better training. His people had to be equipped with more knowledge and better tools to make the right decisions.

Rather than clipping their wings, with all that this entailed, time, effort and even money would have to be invested in order to get the potential offenders up to speed.

The point should be clear.

We're living in the age of instant solutions. In business, as in other areas of our lives, we're inclined to fall into the trap of shortcuts, easy answers, the least painful way out. Why do we make bad rules? Often, it's because we're not really attacking our problems head on.

Rather, we're avoiding them. And therein lies the danger - and the challenge!

Labels: business communication, business ethics, customer service, the workplace

Stumble It!

Business consultant George Torok talks about a phone call - one of many similar ones - during his first days as a new entrepreneur. It's a story that must be very familiar to many business people and consumers alike, and if you're lucky enough never to have been bothered by this kind of thing in real life, chances are you come across the technique every time you logon to the Internet.

Somebody asked for him by his company name and told him he'd won a prize. Actually, two prizes, and what's more, he could choose them from a long list that included a personal computer, a trip to Club Med, a diamond pendant, a video camera and an "entertainment centre" (in plain language, a TV) that he could readily dispose of for a cool $8,000 in cash.

Well, what more could any guy want, but of course, Mr Torok was astute enough to politely enquire if there was anything he was expected to do in return for such extreme generosity. Not very much, he was told, just to purchase a little bit of advertising. And needless to add, our star salesperson was far less articulate in explaining the nature and benefits of the product she was selling than she had been in describing the wonderful features of the generous prizes.

Is there anything unethical about this kind of marketing practice? Technically speaking, maybe not: did the canvasser actually say that there were no strings attached when she first offered the prizes? At any rate, the "victim" in such situations gets off relatively lightly, since the deception lasts, at most, a few minutes!

But, of course, a person can be misled in all sorts of ingenious ways - ways that allow the perpetrator to plead that technically his hands have remained clean. And often the consequences are more serious and longer lasting.

Sometimes, one can mislead or deceive by simply remaining silent. In one of my articles on our site I wrote about a young entrepreneur who managed to swing a lucrative business deal while giving the other side the impression that she was representing her former employer. "They never directly asked me," she confessed, "so I let them believe what they wanted to believe."

In a very interesting - but to my way of thinking, disturbing - article on Fortune Small Business, Seth Godin, long regarded as a seminal thinker on the philosophy of modern marketing, relates another revealing incident involving the use of the silent technique. This one has a particularly ironic aspect.

In the 1980's a few enterprising opportunists bought some name-brand stereo speakers and packed them into a truck. They parked the truck behind a dorm at Harvard and started whispering, "Psst...Hey! You wanna buy some speakers?" Passersby assumed that the speakers were stolen, and therefore this had to be a great bargain. The stock was sold out in no time. Little did the students realize that they were paying the same price that they would pay at the local store, but of course, these back-street entrepreneurs didn't have to pay a dime in advertising, rent or the like...



Well, if you never thought appearing to be dishonest can be to your advantage, you have to think again!

But seriously...yes we are talking about something serious here. Godin's central thesis is that if you want to attract customers in an increasingly competitive world, you have to be prepared to tell lies, as long as your lies are essentially the truth.

An incredible feat of verbal gymnastics? Well, marketers are performing such feats every single day, he says. What the guys who sold the speakers did is essentially no different from the people who sell an obstensibly more sophisticated version of a gadget for $100 when the model that sells for $10 performs its function just as well. But since people believe that the more expensive version does a better job, so it does. And that's the truth!

Fine. If that's what makes the wheels of commerce turn round, OK. But it worries me all the same.

What do you think?

Labels: business communication, business ethics, customer service

Stumble It!