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Posts Tagged ‘customer service’

Here are Seven Business Growth W.O.W.® tactics for increased market share that you can deploy now:

1. Rule 1-12-50© – The first portion of every month (hence the number 1), consistently every month (hence the number 12), identify a population index upwards of fifty (hence the number 50) key customers or emerging customers and provide them a value added communication.

2. eSignature Line – Consider adding into your standard email auto signature line any updates on products or services you provide to all recipients of your communication exchanges. This also serves as a powerful standardization for ensuring customers receive advance notices for deadlines, product or service announcements, changes and discontinuations, etc.

3. eAuto Responder - Consider adding into your standard email auto responder (if you don’t engage it routinely, especially engage it when you will be away from email receiving) any updates on products or services you provide to all recipients of your communication exchanges. This is also a great way to promote and advertise to those people that initiate sending email traffic to you first, as now you can instantly bounce back a message to them.

4. Hotel Letters – Realize that in most all hotels there seems to be at least pieces of stationary and envelopes in the desk drawer. Consider a hand written note to three “Vital Fews” about something that is top of mind to you and of value to them.

5. “Advocate” Maintenance – Ensure that you never let an advocate get more than 30 days out from hearing from or seeing you. Plan regular communications and/or “thank you” events to draw from them ways to continue to enhance the service you provide to them.

6. Newsletter – Design a high impact, value rich content based print newsletter for your core customers (the Vital Few) and send routinely to them as a way to enrich their value proposition in their market. Then, soft communicate a product/service from you to them at the end of each newsletter. This vehicle can be distributed to customers as statement-stuffers, attachments with invoices and contracts, attached to proposals and general correspondence from customer service contact professionals and the sales team alike. This can serve as a source for the Rule 1-12-50© campaign.

7. Fax Alerts – Consider a Friday afternoon fax blast to your customers with any products/services that can impact their bottom line, send announcements and press releases, etc. If these contact names are in your data base as clients and or contacts that you have a pre existing relationship with and/or have established a relationship with whereby they want communication offers from you, than a Fax alert or blast is a smart, fast, economical and acceptable contact means. Conversely, if you don’t have this rapport or permission then a fax blast may be seen as spam and be illegal in some non business growth oriented communities!

Deploy these field-tested and proven strategies now and watch your business flourish.

1. Be assertive – not aggressive or passive. My definition of assertion is simple: “Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t be mean when you say it.” Let this rule guide your conversations with all customers and you will always be confident, cool, and in control AND you’ll always be professional.
2. Speak more slowly. You’ll be amazed at how much more clearly you can think and how much control and confidence you experience when you consciously slow down your rate of speech. Speak slowly and methodically when your emotional triggers are launched and you’ll maintain poise during difficult conversations.

3. Wait 1-2 seconds before responding. Responding immediately to difficult or tactical customers could result in you saying something you’ll later regret. Before you respond, take a deep breath, wait at least 2 seconds, and think about the best response and the best approach.

4. Take a time-out. When you sense that your buttons have been pushed, take a break. You can tell the customer you need to put him on hold while you review a file, or whatever excuse sounds good at the time. The point is to get away from the customer for a few seconds so you can re-group.

5. Use positive self-talk. I’m going to sound like Dr. Phil on this one, but I’m quite serious. Instead of saying to yourself, “I don’t get paid enough to put up with this ____.” Say something more positive like “This guy really needs my help.” Thinking more positively helps you respond more positively and professionally. Negative thoughts lead to negative words, and it spirals into a very negative situation.

6. Show your power before you use it. Often, a subtle suggestion of your “power” is far more effective than the outright use of your power. As a customer service professional you may have the power to terminate a phone call. You could say to your customer: “If you don’t stop yelling, I will terminate this call.” But, believe it or not, you are far more “powerful” if you say, “I want to help you, but when you yell and cut me off, you make it difficult for me to work with you.” The latter statement demonstrates your power and your message most definitely gets across. The former statement uses up all of your ammunition and won’t usually diffuse an irate customer.

These incredibly simple tips will position you to keep your cool when customers get hot!

A couple of months ago I had a small kitchen fire in my home. All is well now, but for a few days my family and I camped out in a hotel room and once we returned home we had no oven (it was destroyed in the fire) so we were forced to eat every meal out for several days.

On the day of the fire two representatives from the insurance company told me to “Hold on to your meal receipts, send them to us and we’ll cover your meals plus sales tax.” After the contractors restored my home and we settled back in, I was preparing to mail in my meal receipts for reimbursement and I gave my adjuster a quick call before dropping the envelope of receipts in the mail. He explained that reimbursement was actually for 50% of meals and not 100%. While a partial adjustment made sense to me, I clearly recalled two company representatives promising to “cover meals plus sales tax.”

My adjuster became sarcastic and defensive in both his words and tone and said, “No one in this entire company would have told you we cover 100% of meals. Our policy is to cover 50% because you would have been eating even if the fire had not occurred.”

I was livid. Now it’s no longer about the issue, it’s about the principle. So what did I do? I assembled all the facts that supported my case, presented an opening argument to the company’s corporate office calmly and methodically, and finally delivered a fervent and succinct summation of my evidence and closed the deal—walking away with 100% of my meal charges.

Here’s the lesson here: Had the claims adjuster done and said the right things during my initial phone call, the company would have been able to resolve this problem with a simple explanation and apology. Instead, they paid out nearly $200 more than they had to and had to spend 10 minutes listening to my case.

This costly scenario is played out countless times every day throughout the service sector because employees don’t know how to communicate with upset customers with diplomacy and tact and in such a way that creates calm and goodwill.

In my case, had the claims adjuster responded with, “What we were trying to explain is that your policy covers 50% of your meals plus sales tax. You would have been out of expenses for meals even if you had not experienced the regretful fire. We try to minimize your inconvenience during your loss by covering expenses above and beyond your normal meal expenses. Does this make sense? I’m so sorry for any inconvenience this misunderstanding has caused you.”

This approach certainly made sense and I would have very likely accepted the 50% policy. But instead, the claim adjuster’s attitude incited me and I was determined to accept nothing but full reimbursement. The wrong approach to an already upset customer only makes them more forceful and often results in a much higher payout from the company. I don’t want you to have to pay one dollar more than you absolutely have to and to help you manage costs better I’ll give you 5 things not to do with upset customers.

1. Don’t tell a customer they are wrong. Telling your customer he is wrong arouses opposition and will make the customer want to battle with you. It’s difficult, under even the most benign situations to change people’s minds. So why make your job harder by starting out on the wrong foot.

2. Don’t argue with a customer. You can never win an argument with your customers. Certainly, you can prove your point and even have the last word, you may even be right, but as far as changing your customer’s mind is concerned, you will probably be just as futile as if you were wrong.

3. Don’t speak with authoritative tone as if you have to prove the customer wrong. Even when the customer is wrong, this is not an appropriate response, as it will put the customer on the defense.

4. Don’t say, “We would never do that.” Instead try, “Tell me about that.”

5. Don’t be afraid to apologize. Offer an apology even when the customer is at fault. An apology is not admission of fault. It can be offered to express regret. For example, “I’m so sorry for any inconvenience this misunderstanding has caused you.”

Never forget in problem situations the issue is not the issue. The way the issue is handled becomes the issue.

At the beginning of my creative career, I volunteered as an overnight deejay at a college radio station.  I loved playing the music and interacting with insomniac listeners, but I got a real kick out of reading the news.  I would tear copy straight off the wire service printer and if I was lucky, I had a producer turn that raw newsfeed into informational text that I read into the microphone.  The text was broken up into reasonable sentences that were designed for easy delivery over the air.  When my producer didn’t show up for my shift, I did this myself  I’d mark up the page, insert pauses, and emphasize the words and sentence clauses that I wanted to stress.  If I couldn’t be understood over a fuzzy and weak AM signal, then what was the point of taking five minutes at the top of the hour to deliver the news?  I had a lot of fun and I learned how to “speak” all over again.  Whenever I do any live speaking today, I use the same exact techniques that I learned while the “On-Air” sign was flashing above the studio.  I mark up my speech or the text passage I’m reading because I know that impact is everything.  If I lose my breath in the middle of a sentence, then it’s too long.  If the last word of a sentence drops out inaudibly, my message is lost.  If I stumble on an unfamiliar word or name, my audience loses confidence in my message.

Live telephone operators who work in call centers and answering services need the same help that any live speaker needs.  It’s the job of the call center operator to communicate the client’s business image to the caller, and this begins with the first few seconds of the phone call.  Many small business owners’ needs never go beyond representatives answering their lines with “XYZ Company, may I help you?” and improvising the rest of the conversation to obtain the information that the client requests.  When clients upgrade their accounts to more complex services, it’s important that they create a script that works for both the company signing up for the service, the operator reading the script, and the customer. Your sales representative is more than willing to help you create the best script to fit all of your sales or information inquiries.

Creating a call center script begins with the “answer phrase” and the same principles continue through the entire process of creating a logical script.  H ere are some important items to keep in mind when you are creating your script:

• Avoid tongue twisters.Make your greeting as easy to pronounce as possible.  “Doctor Perkowicz Peoria Plastic Surgery Plaza” isn’t easy to say, even for the native English speaker.  Make sure that your operators know how to pronounce every part of your answer phrase, and the rest of the words in your script.  Keep phrases brief and avoid repeating consonant sounds that will sound awkward over the phone or might lead the operator to stutter.

• Go global. A “Good Morning/ Evening” greeting can work for some businesses, but not for all of them.  If your company is doing business across time zones, think about using a simple “Hello, XYZ Company” for your customer on the other end of the globe.

• Humanize your greeting.  Have an impartial friend or a trusted customer listen to your greeting, especially if it’s a long introductory message of more than a sentence or two.  Do you sound like a recording?  If you give that impression to a caller, the person on the other end of the line might just hang up because she wants to talk with a live person, not a machine.  Keep all parts of your script brief and give the operator relaying your message time to breathe and sound like a live person when you create your script.

• Less is more. There’s a temptation to try and pack all the information about your company into your call center script, including providing an operator a copy of your frequently asked questions list (FAQ) so that he or she can quickly scan the file and answer 99.9 % of your callers’ questions.  However, this skill takes practice and training on the part of the operator and patience on the part of the caller.  Long pauses to look up information, add expensive minutes to the call and are frustrating experiences for the operator and the caller alike.  Extensive account training is available through most call centers, if your budget permits.  If this resource is not an option for you, limit the information available to the operators to a few facts about your product or service, and let them know that it’s okay to ask callers if someone from the right department can return their call and answer their questions in depth.

• Test.  Call your account weekly and test to make sure that the operators are following your instructions, are handling your scripts the way that you expect, and are able to easily access the information that they need to take your calls. After the honeymoon period with a new account, operators often grow lax and shorten your script, or improvise far beyond the call of duty. This can be detrimental to your business. Make sure that you follow up with your call center to make sure they are serving your needs.

• Tweak, and tweak again. Review your script from time to time, and see if it’s still leading to action. Ultimately, your script should lead to a sale, an appointment a request for more information or further contact from your office. Check your call logs and any statistics your sales representative provides you with on a monthly basis. If you notice a downward trend in your results, work with your sales rep to change your script.

These suggestions are only the beginning of creating a successful call center script for your organization.  Work with your sales representative and listen to their suggestions, add your own, do your market research and your script will be a success.  Clear communication starts with clear instructions from you, and clear voices on the answering end of your phone lines.  Your call center will work with you to make sure that all of your needs are filled over and above your expectations.