It's How You Handle It
I recently experienced
a case of “misunderstanding” where I thought I was buying one product, but the
other party was under a different impression.
The result was that I ended up paying for a product I didn't want and
then being charged extra for the service that I actually wanted in the first
place.
My decision was to cut my losses on the basis that if the
other side couldn't understand my needs and didn’t check, then I shouldn’t deal
with them. The transaction was done on what the service provider called their
“Live Chat’ tool and, looking back at the script, it seemed clear to me that I
was asking for one thing, but got another.
So how could both sides have handled it better…
- Could I have been clearer in my writing (especially as I didn't know how well the other party understood “my English”?
- Should the service provider have double-checked their understanding and told me what I was getting so that there was no potential for misunderstanding or ambiguity?
- It’s one of those situations where, on looking back, one can only learn from it, especially that we can never waste too much time:
- Checking that we have understood what’s going on;
- Checking that the other person has really understood what’s going on.
We’re normally in such a hurry to “get things done” that we
tend to assume that the other person understands what we need. In a situation where we’re talking to someone
of the same age, background, culture, educational and social level that may be
reasonable, but how often in our globalised business world is this really
likely to happen? When I call my credit
card “Hotline”, I can be speaking to an operator in Mumbai or Manila, depending
on the time of day.
How we handle
things is up to us. The better we learn
and the better we do this, the more likely we’ll succeed in our endeavours.
Labels: Customer Care, Selling
posted by William Martin @ 07:56
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