Customer Service Training Mall > It Starts With You!

Sometimes it's easy to blame the product, the customer, a particular rule or procedure, or just anything for a particular situation. And sometimes you might just be right. But Customer Service is not about assessing blame, it's about satisfying a customer!

Customer Service Training teaches us that we have a crucial and important role in the customer experience. No matter what the issue or problem might be, we have the ability to make it either better or worse. In other words, we can be part of the problem or part of the solution. We decide which role we will play.

Our role is not to determine who is right or who is wrong. though it might seem wrong, right or wrong sometimes makes little difference. If a customer is wrong and you tell him so and refuse to help him, he will likely go to your competition next time. But if he is wrong and you figure out a way to help him, you might just create a life-long customer!

Granted customers need to be told when they did something wrong to cause a product to fail or a situation to be created. If you just resolve it this time, the same thing is likely to happen again and again in the future. Each time the customer may get more and more angry. But there are different ways of telling people they did something wrong. You can be direct and accusatory and risk offending a customer, or you get be discreet and give the customer a "way out" and not appear threatening. If you handle it correctly, you can resolve most situations without losing a customer.

You will find you have much greater success when you give customers a way out of accepting blame. Saying something like "Many people do this even though it is not a good practice" lets the customer know he did something wrong but also makes him feel that he is not stupid or foolish at the same time. We get our point across without making the customer feel bad.

The important thing to remember is that a situation will follow the course that all parties involved lead it to take. By that I mean that if all parties are angry, the situation will get worse. If all parties are pleasant and try to work things out, it will go more smoothly. So the next time you enter a situation try and decide how best to handle it in such a way that the customer ends the process happy and satisfied. This does not measn giving them everything they demand, it just means being fair, pleasant, and postive. If you can do that, you will find your life gets a lot easier and your angry customers getting fewer and fewer!