This customer service situation, a customer seeking help in person, is the most common customer service interaction so it’s extremely important to get it right.
Read through Tips for Better Customer Service: How to Help a Customer and print the article for convenience.
Then use the points in the article to assess how well you and/or your staff are handling this customer service situation. (Once again, be sure to have someone else assess your own customer service performance, as you won’t be able to deal with the customer properly if you’re trying to evaluate your performance at the same time.)
After assessing several customer-seeking-help situations, you’ll know how your customer service performance measures up, and be able to pinpoint specific problems if there are any. Use the tips in the article to improve your customer service as needed.
Continue reading to learn how to improve customer service when dealing with customer complaints and returns and how to evaluate your Customer Service Makeover.
C) Good Customer Service: Customer Complaints and Returns
Customer complaints and returns are also extremely common customer service interactions. Providing good customer service for a customer with a return depends on two factors; your business’s return policy and the way you and/or your staff interact with the customer during the return process.
Tips for Handling Store Returns discusses both these factors and explains exactly what you have to do to provide good customer service for this customer service situation.
Once you’ve read through and printed the article for your convenience, you can use it to assess both your return policy and how well you and/or your staff deal with customers who are trying to return items. After assessing several such situations, use the tips in the article to improve your customer service as needed.
The same basic rules that apply to handling returns also apply to handling customer complaints. There are two differences that are important to bear in mind when trying to improve customer service for customer complaints:
- Customers making complaints need to feel they are being listened to. Listen actively by making eye contact, nodding, or even jotting down a note. Ask clarifying questions when the customer is finished speaking if necessary to get more details that will enable you to solve the customer’s problem. Do not interrupt a customer when he or she is speaking.
- Customers making complaints need closing action. When a customer makes a return, the close of the customer service interaction is the customer getting her money back or something else of value. A customer making a complaint needs to get something of value out of the exchange, too; some action relevant to the complaint, whether it be a promise to follow up or a future discount.
Bearing these two points in mind, you can use the information in Tips for Handling Store Returns to assess how well you and/or your staff are handling customer complaints and improve your customer service as necessary depending on how your assessment of your customer service performance goes.
For more on dealing with customer complaints, see Good Customer Service Means Losing the Battle.
3) Follow up and evaluate.
Once you’ve worked through the exercises in this customer service workout, take a few moments to reflect on what you’ve accomplished here. How specifically has your business’s customer service improved? If you’re the type that makes lists, make one that lists these accomplishments.
Know that just like any other exercise program, you won’t continue to benefit from these improvements unless you keep practicing. So you’ll need to continue to spot-check your staff’s customer service interactions and help them stay focused on good customer service by reviewing how to provide good customer service for the interactions you’ve worked on here with them in staff meetings and individual conversations.
Keep monitoring and encouraging good customer service – and then take it to the people once again, just as you did in point one of this Customer Service Makeover, surveying your customers’ opinions about your customer service. You should find that they’re a lot more positive about their interactions with your business – and positive customers is what good customer service is all about.
Looking for more of the Small Business Makeover?
- The Business Planning Makeover – create a Business Action Plan that will provide your small business direction for the coming year or longer.
- The Business Finance Makeover – Follow the steps in this business finance makeover, from separating your personal and business finances through financial statement analysis, to make sure that your business finances are in good shape.
- Information Technology Makeover – Learn how to secure and manage your business data, manage customer contacts, set up a document management system and prepare an Information Technology maintenance and crisis plan in this Information Technology Makeover.