Out of my 38 years of life experiences, there is one thing I have learned that will take you from the bottom to the top and that is just to be nice. Being nice to others doesn’t have to be over the top, fake, or cost a fortune, but it does need to be sincere and genuine.
Customer service can be a hard position because usually you are on the front line for all the issues a business’s customer may experience. It only takes one thing to go wrong to change a customer’s point of view from “I have a problem” to “Oh no they didn’t” and that is a horrible place to be.
Customers can tell when the person on the other end of the phone is listening, understanding, and in a good mood. A lot of people can hear a smile through the actual line. With that, then they can also hear the disdain you may be indirectly expressing about the customer and their complaints. Regardless of company policies or what’s going on in your personal life, we have to exude niceness.
Nice doesn’t mean you have to give away the farm to make the customer happy. Nice just means treat others the way you want to be treated. There may be some things you can’t do for the customer, but in how you approach it makes all the difference.
Customers don’t want to have an issue and contact the business to have someone negatively responding to their concerns. The positive approach shows respect for the customer and the money and time they have given your company. Don’t fret, this can be learned if an employee is willing to relinquish control and understand the customer isn’t upset with you personally at this point. They are upset about their experience and we should handle that with kid gloves.
Check out these 3 easy tips on how to respond appropriately to customers:
- Attitude
The entire point of customer service is to help the customer. A vital aspect of this is to have a positive attitude. It doesn’t matter if the customer is acting emotionally, you have to maintain your composure. Keeping a positive attitude allows the customer to see you are willing to listen to them and your professionalism reflects highly on the company which the employee is an extension of. Without control over your attitude things will get out of hand quickly. It becomes a battle to be heard by both parties. At that point, the relationship is strained and could potentially be over.
- Empathy
I always tell our employees here at Hometown Quotes that no one calls up (your local fast food restaurant) to tell them they got the order right. They mostly call to let them know what they have done wrong. It is our job to empathize with them on what they think went wrong and see what solutions we can provide to help them. Empathy will diffuse the situation and will allow the customer to feel secure in the company addressing their concerns. Check out our previous post dedicated to customer empathy.
- Tone
Tone is tricky. You could be saying everything right, but in the wrong tone. And contrary to popular beliefs, there can be tone in most nonverbal communications as well. Our tone and emotion can travel through the phone and/or email. Your tone will be the beginning of whether you diffuse the situation or if you in turn make it more difficult. Choose your words wisely, be professional, if using emojis be conscientious, make sure not to use ALL CAPS because it could be taken as yelling, and make sure there are no grammatical errors because all these points could cause misrepresentation of what you really are saying.
Learning how to approach customers will increase the satisfaction of your customer experience. Any skill sets that are being learned will take time and dedication, but are vital to customer service success. We have other content, resources, and tools you can download from Hometown University that are things we have learned along the way that could be vital to your company’s success. If you would like to know more about any other content that we don’t have posted, please feel free to email me directly.
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