Basics of Customer Service
Robert Bacal
There must be a billion words written about customer service. Advice abounds, from the banal and obvious (smile when you talk on the phone) to complex and difficult suggestions about how to “create a corporate culture of excellent customer service.”
Amid all the words, simple or fancy, is a basic hidden truth about customer service: the person who interacts directly with the customer determines whether that customer perceives that he or she is receiving poor customer service, excellent service, or something in between. If you serve customers directly, you have the power to affect their perceptions. That customer contact is where “the rubber meets the road.”
If you provide service to customers, your words and behaviors are the tools you use to create a positive customer perception of you and the company you work for. Whether you’re a novice working with customers or a seasoned pro, what you do and say will affect how customers see you. You can’t help it. Customers will form opinions, so you might as well learn how to create positive opinions. But you need to know how to do that.
It might be that you get paid minimum wage and you don’t plan to stay in your customer service job. Why care what customers think? The answer is simple—self-interest! Customers who form negative opinions about you can make your life miserable. When they get angry, they complain, slow down service for others (making them mad), threaten, swear, and otherwise do things that add stress to your job. In some cases, their anger can escalate to the point where your physical safety is at risk. All because you couldn’t be bothered or didn’t care. It’s to your benefit to provide decent customer service just for these reasons. More on what’s in it for you in a moment.
That’s what this book is for—to teach you about the dozens and dozens of techniques you can use when interacting with customers so they’ll walk away with positive feelings about the experience. You’ll learn about very specific things you can do or say in all kinds of customer interactions.You’ll learn how to deal with difficult customers.You’ll learn how to approach customers and how to get information from them so you can do your job.You’ll learn to deal with customer service problems quickly, efficiently,and professionally. Best of all, the techniques in this book will fit your needs, whether you serve burgers, staff the desk in a hotel, help people in health care environments, or even work for the government.
This site will tell you exactly what to do and say, and it will provide you with numerous examples so you can use customer service techniques effectively. Let’s get started!
What’s in It for Me?
Why should you be concerned with providing excellent customer service? You don’t own the company. You may not get paid more for providing excellent customer service. So, what’s in it for you?
There are three powerful reasons for learning to provide great customer service: greater job satisfaction, reduced stress and hassle, and enhanced job success.
First, very few people derive any job satisfaction when they feel that the time they spend at work is “wasted.”Most of us need to feel useful and productive—to make a difference, whether it’s helping a fast food customer make healthier food choices or dispensing legal advice. When you provide high-quality customer service, you feel that you’re making that difference and can derive pride in your work.The day goes faster.
When you do a good job with a customer, such as calming down someone who’s angry and complaining, you feel good about having achieved something.Perhaps more important than your own perceptions are the customer’s perceptions, when you do a good job with a customer and he or she tells you what you’ve achieved. That feedback helps you feel good about yourself and your performance.Doing a good job and taking pride in how you serve customers are ways to prevent job burnout.
Second, deliver quality customer service and you will save yourself a lot of stress and hassle.When you learn and use customer service skills, you are far less likely to get into protracted, unpleasant, and upsetting interactions with a customer. You make yourself less of a target for customer wrath.That’s because customer service skills help keep customers from becoming angry and reduce the length and intensity of the anger when and if difficult customer service situations occur.
Third, learning and using quality customer service techniques helps form the perceptions of those who may be able to help your career—supervisors, managers, and potential employers. Using these techniques makes you look good to everyone, and that’s critical in getting promoted, receiving pay raises, and getting new job opportunities.Managers and supervisors notice when a customer asks for you specifically because you do such a good job or comments positively about how you’ve helped.
Of course, you may have other reasons to want to provide the best customer service possible.You may want to contribute to the success of your employer.You may like the feeling of having other employees look up to you as a good model.Or you may even benefit directly if you work on a commission basis. In many jobs, people who are good at customer service earn more.
Regardless of your reasons, quality customer service techniques can be learned,and you can learn them with a little effort.
In the rest of this chapter, we’ll provide an overview of customer service principles and issues and explain how to use this book. In the next chapter, we’ll describe 60 techniques you should be using. The rest of the book is dedicated to showing you how to use those techniques.
Different Kinds of Customers
Before we continue,we should clarify what the word “customer” means.
You’re probably familiar with our starting definition: the customer is the person who pays for goods or services that you provide. This definition works in some contexts, but not all. It breaks down in situations where money doesn’t directly change hands. For example, people often interact with government, public schools, and other organizations.They receive goods or services from them,but do not pay anything directly to them.We need to change our definition so that people who interact with these organizations fall under our definition of customer, since they, too, deserve high-quality customer service, even if they aren’t paying directly.
Here’s a better definition: the customer is the person next in line who receives your output (service, products). That person may purchase goods or services directly or receive output you create or deliver without direct payment.The person may be outside your company, but this definition also includes anyone within the company who receives output from you.
There are four basic types of customers. Regardless of type, each customer deserves to receive top-quality customer service, and each can make your work life miserable if you don’t provide it.
First, there are external paying customers.These are the people who pay to eat in a restaurant, pay for health care and legal advice, or pay to stay in a hotel.
Second, there are internal customers. These are people who receive output (services, products, information) that you create or provide, but who are in the same organization as you. Internal customers may be billed via interdepartmental charge systems, or there may be no payment system in place. For example, human resources staff members involved in hiring employees, in effect, work for internal customers (the managers of the work units needing new employees). The technician who maintains company computers works for internal customers (the people who use the computers he or she maintains).
Third, there are external nonpaying customers. These customers receive services, goods, or other outputs but don’t directly pay for them. For example, the tourist who visits a traveler’s information kiosk by the highway may receive tourist information (outputs) and maps (goods), but doesn’t pay directly.That tourist is a customer.Another example is the parent who attends the parent- teacher meeting at the local public school. He or she receives outputs and services from the teacher, but doesn’t pay the teacher directly.That parent needs to be treated like a customer, too.
That brings us to the fourth type of customer, regulated customers. Government organizations interact with people in ways that aren’t oriented toward providing something to individuals, but are involved in regulating them for the common good. It might seem like people regulated by the government through licenses, zoning regulations, permits, and other controls are really not customers.We want to include them, however, because even though government regulates them, they still deserve the best possible levels of customer service. Including this group under the term customer reminds us (and, hopefully, government employees) that even when employees are telling people what to do or what they are allowed (or not allowed) to do, they need to apply principles of customer service.This applies to border guards,immigration officials, health inspectors, building code enforcers, and to every position you can imagine in the public sector.
First Things First—Dispelling an Important Customer Service Myth
We need to address the single most popular false idea about customer service. It’s a great slogan, credited to H. Gordon Selfridge, who passed away in 1947. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase,“The customer is always right.”Unfortunately, it’s wrong and misleading.
Clearly the customer is not always right. Customers make unreasonable requests and have unreasonable expectations. Customers sometimes even play fast and loose with the truth. Customers may not understand your company and what you can and can’t do for them.
Practically speaking,you can’t operate under the assumption that the customer is always right.You can’t give every customer what he or she asks for.
Can we come up with a phrase or two that realistically describe how we should treat customers? Yes.Here are two short phrases that fit the bill.
■ The customer always deserves to be treated as if he or she is important and his or her opinions, needs, and wants are worth your attention.
■ The customer deserves to receive maximum effort of those serving him or her, even when the customer’s expectations, wants, and needs may be impractical.
Since the customer isn’t “always right” and it’s often not possible to give the customer what he or she wants, what are the implications for customer service?
It’s simple. The customer has other important wants and needs besides getting what he or she is asking for. Even in situations where you can’t do what the customer asks, you can contribute to development of the customer’s positive impression about how he or she is treated. That’s what we’ve captured in the two phrases above.We need to focus not only on what we provide to the customer,but on how we provide it.That’s the key to realistic, excellent customer service.To do that,you need to understand these other wants and needs—and that’s where we’re going to go next.
Understanding What Customers Want
One thing about the customer service techniques you’re going to learn: you can’t succeed with them by memorizing them or using them in every situation. The key to customer service is doing the right thing at the right time.
To be able to choose the right techniques and to use them effectively, you have to understand what customers want. Knowing this will help you make sense of the techniques you’ll be looking at. Below is a list of the most important customer wants and needs.When you address these, you create positive customer perceptions about you and your company.That means fewer arguments, fewer hassles, and better customer relationships. Customers want:
■ problem solved
■ effort
■ acknowledgment and understanding
■ choices and options
■ positive surprises
■ consistency, reliability, and predictability
■ value (not necessarily best price)
■ reasonable simplicity
■ speed
■ confidentiality
■ sense of importance
Customers want their problem solved.They want to get what they want from you, whether it’s a product, service, or other output. This is the customer service “want” that most people are familiar with. However, it’s not always possible to give the customer what he or she wants, which is where the rest of the “wants” come in. Even if you can’t solve the customer’s problem, you can create positive perceptions by addressing the other, less obvious customer wants.
Customers expect that you (and your company) will make an effort to address their problems,concerns,and needs,even if you can’t give them what they want. Customers respect effort, often pay attention to effort above and beyond the call of duty, and will turn on you (create hassles) if they sense that you aren’t making an effort. Many of the techniques you’ll learn later in this book work because they demonstrate “effort above and beyond the call of duty.”
Customers want and expect to have their wants, needs, expectations, feelings, and words acknowledged and understood. That means listening and proving to the customer that you have “got” what he or she is saying. Customers who feel understood and acknowledged feel important, and that’s a vital part of good customer relationships.
Customers also want to feel they have choices and options and are not trapped by you or your company. They want to feel they can decide and that you’re helping them, rather than the other way around. When customers feel helpless or powerless, they’re more likely to become frustrated, angry, and aggressive.
Customers also appreciate “positive surprises.” Positive surprises are things you do that go above and beyond their hopes and expectations (going the extra five miles).They include offering discounts or providing some other benefit that’s normally unavailable to them. Positive surprises are most useful when dealing with difficult or angry customers.
Consistency, reliability, and predictability are also important customer wants. Customers expect that you will treat them in a consistent way and that you’ll always do what you say you’ll do. By acting in accordance with these wants, you provide the customer with a sense of security and confidence in both you personally and in the company.This builds loyalty.
Customers also expect value for their investments of time and money.What’s interesting here is that while money (price) is part of the value equation,it’s only a part.When customers look at value, they also take into account how they’re treated, the quality and expertise of the advice they receive from you to help them make decisions, and a number of other factors. You may not be able to affect the price of services or products you provide, but you can add value by helping the customer in other ways.
Reasonable simplicity is another important customer want. These days many people are overwhelmed by a complex world. If you complicate the customers’ world or make them jump through a number of hoops, they will become frustrated and angry. One of your customer service roles should be to make things easier for the customer, not more complicated, without oversimplifying or treating the customers in a condescending way.
Speed and prompt service are also important. At minimum, customers want you to make the effort to help them quickly and efficiently. They also expect that you will not create situations that have them waiting around unnecessarily.While you may not always be able to control how fast a customer is served, you can convey a sense that you’re working at top speed.
Confidentiality is an important aspect of customer service. Clearly customers want you to keep their sensitive information to yourself,but it goes further than that.Customers also want a degree of privacy even when talking to you about what may seem to be a mundane or nonsensitive issue. Customers may feel uncomfortable if there are other staff or customers crowding around them.
We’ve left the most important need for last.Customers need the sense that they are important.Many of the above wants tie into this. Listening to and acknowledging customers demonstrates that you believe they are important.So does arranging for pleasant surprises or making an effort. Many of the specific phrases and techniques you’re going to learn tie directly into helping the customer feel important.