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
posted by William Martin @ 08:32
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