When You Can't Help...
There are rare
occasions when, despite the best will in the world, you won't be able to help a
customer. How you handle this makes the
difference between keeping their loyalty and seeing your business’ name in
print for the wrong reasons.
I recently had an experience with the supplier of an app
that I had downloaded from the iTunes Store.
The app had been updated and I wanted to update my version. For some reason, it wouldn't update, so I
contacted the developer whose response was, “you know it’s best you contact iTunes Customer Services, they will
advise.”
I
wasn’t impressed. I had paid for the
app, and felt that I had been “fobbed off”.
After a short correspondence with the developer (during which my emails
seemed to be forwarded progressively “up the line”) I finally received a
response that made sense.
The
issue was, the developer, whilst absolutely in the right, failed to explain why
this wasn’t their problem. I may have
been handled by an inexperienced member of the support team, but that is the
developer’s problem, not mine.
As
I stood my ground, I finally received a sensible answer. How many customers will do this, though? Most of them will walk away and post a bad
review of your business because of the way in which they were handled.
Having
worked in customer service, I’ve experienced all too often the frustration of
being the one trying to explain to an irate customer why we simply can’t
help. The reasons are many: the law, the customer’s own actions, lack of
technology, or others. Our natural
instinct is to help; no one gets up in the morning wondering “How can I ruin
someone’s day today?” Luckily, these occasions are rare, but the
sense of helplessness one feels is overwhelming.
The
skill is in knowing how to explain
the situation and being able to suggest at least a partial solution. This needs knowledge, diplomacy and a
highly-tuned sense of interpersonal dynamics.
It’s something most of us acquire as we grow in experience, although
some people seem to be “better” at it than others.
What
I would recommend is that people who face customers are trained, have a sense
of what the customer is going through and an appreciation of the impact of any
answer they give. Finally, these “impossible”
situations might have to be referred to someone more experienced than left to
junior staff.
I have spent more than half my life
delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to
“emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in international financial
services around the world running
different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to
offer solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk
management. I work with individuals,
small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across
the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be
contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of
services. For strategic questions that
you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Customer Care, Selling
Call Them Back!
Along with other great
lies such as “The cheque’s in the post”, one of the phrases I dread hearing is
“I’ll call you back”.
Let’s face it, how many times have all of us been let down
by someone saying that they’ll call back, only to find ourselves picking up the
phone a week later and starting off with “Hello, I called last week about
[whatever you called about] and I was told I’d get a call back. Well, I haven’t had a call back…”
The person on the other end of the line (often not the one to whom we originally spoke)
apologises profusely and may even have to ask what it was all about (unless
they’ve got a good Customer Management System that they can call up within
seconds and their systems are “online”…). So we go through the whole story again (or
not) wondering why we believed that we’d actually get a call… If we’re lucky, the problem is then solved.
The trouble is that, these days, this seems to be normal.
Because of the ways businesses organise their customer call centres,
it’s very unlikely that a customer will actually get a call back.
Imagine the surprise if the phone rang and it actually was
the business that had promised to call us back.
What would we think then?
Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote about the effect that
customer
expectations can have on an organisation’s success.
Sadly, nothing much seems to have changed.
“We’re no worse than our competitors” is how some justify themselves. Great, so mediocrity is the new
“normal”? It doesn't take much effort to
raise your game above the 99 other percent of mediocre providers to put you at
the top of a badly played game.
So next time you say “I’ll call you back”, diarise it, do it
and see what the effect is - usually delight…
I have spent more than half my life
delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to
“emerging” economies. After more than 20 years in the global financial services
industry running different service, operations and lending businesses, I
started my own Performance Management Consultancy to offer solutions for
improving performance, productivity and risk management. I work with individuals, small businesses,
charities, quoted companies and academic institutions. An international
speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be contacted by email
. My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of services. For strategic questions that you should be
asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Customer Care, Productivity, Selling, Strategy
Open Plan Offices - Not Such A Good Idea?
Open plan - originally
hailed as the answer to a more productive environment - are starting to show
that, in some ways, they may not actually be all they’re made out to be.
Open plan offices are cheaper to build and allow
organisations to fit more people into less space - crucial in today’s
cost-conscious world. Those who get
offices of their own are generally CEOs.
Whilst great for
collaboration and communication it’s not suitable for everyone, especially when
they need to focus. Despite more workplaces designed to support,
collaboration, Gensler’s 2013 U.S. Workplace Survey found that time spent in collaboration has
dropped by 20%, whereas time spent on focusing has increased by 13%.
An
interesting survey by Canada Life in 2014 found that people who work in open
plan offices are likely to take up to 70 more sick days than those working from
home… Those who can focus tend to be
more satisfied, higher performing and see their employer as more innovative.
One of the distractions
is noise: apparently, this can hurt recall ability, whilst privacy increases
job performance. One major issue
can be a lack of meeting space. Teams
hold their meetings at their “cluster” and distract others. Have plenty of breakout places visually removed from work
clusters.
Interior
design can have a significant effect on productivity and well-being. Essentially, people need a place where they
feel as “effective” as possible.
Decoration may be one way of helping, but whatever is chosen must be
something that people don't object to.
Light plays a critical role: Lockheed Martin saw a
15% decrease in absenteeism when they moved employees to a building with plenty of
natural daylight. This may be why the
height of cubicle walls is being reduced - to let in more light (but providing
more visual/aural distraction?). The
same effect can be achieved by being next to a window, with the added benefit
that you have a view.
From
all this, it seems that a balanced
workplace is the way to go. Not only
will people get more done, they will also feel more satisfied in their job and
are therefore more likely to remain.
Visual privacy is perhaps a less understood issue: if
employees feel that others can look over their shoulder, they can be up to 50% less productive, according to the Visual Privacy Productivity Study
conducted by the Ponemon Institute in 2013 on behalf of 3M.
In “sensitive” industries (e.g. banking), those who feel
their privacy is compromised are less willing to disclose sensitive
information. This could be costing organisations considerable sums.
Conversely, they are twice
as productive when their visual privacy is protected. One way around this is to allow them to fit
privacy filters on their computers.
Interestingly, sex and age also impact productivity if people feel
their visual privacy is compromised, with women and employees aged over 35
valuing privacy more.
Organisations need to develop policies on working in public
places (open plan offices and airport
departure lounges, train stations, etc).
Not only might this improve productivity, it would also reduce the exposure
of sensitive information.
Comparatively few organisations appreciate the impact of
“mobile technology” (smartphones, tablets), which gives users the choice of
working literally anywhere. They need to
focus on providing workspaces that support individuals who want to decide when,
where and how they work. Again, the Gensler
2013 U.S. Workplace Survey found that
people tend to be more satisfied and more effective across the focus,
collaboration, learning and socialising spectrum if they have a choice.
An unexpected finding was that
employees who have the choice of
“workplace autonomy” still spend up to 70% of their time in the office. They just have the choice of making decisions
based on their need to connect with others and to resources.
The conclusion seems to be, in fact,
that we need to focus on supporting the individual
through a balanced workplace that
offers flexibility if we want to gain
and maintain competitive advantage in the broadest sense of the word. A simple “barn” of an open plan office may be
cheap to build, but may cost more in lost productivity and employee
dissatisfaction.
I have spent more than half my life
delivering change in different world markets from the most developed to
“emerging” economies. With more than 20 years in international financial
services around the world running
different operations and lending businesses, I started my own Consultancy to
offer solutions for improving performance, productivity and risk
management. I work with individuals,
small businesses, charities, quoted companies and academic institutions across
the world. An international speaker, trainer, author and fund-raiser, I can be
contacted by email . My website provides a full picture of my portfolio of
services. For strategic questions that
you should be asking yourself, follow me at @wkm610.Labels: Leadership, Productivity, Strategy, Teamwork
