When the service goes out of customer service

Sorry for the delay in posting, but look forward to more regular musings starting now. As promised, I am starting a series of weekly postings pertaining to customer service issues. Communication is at the root of all customer service, but that fact is often ignored or unknown.

Let’s start this series with avoiding a common mistake: forgetting your ultimate goal. Here’s an example:

• A customer complains to a young (teenage young) sales clerk about a damaged blouse she purchased and requests her money back. The clerk keeps saying the store does not offer refunds. The customer keeps saying the buttons don’t stay in the button holes and therefore the blouse is defective. After the third “we don’t offer refunds,” the customer starts screaming. Although the customer is in the right (no store can refuse to deal with a defective item), she forgot her ultimate goal: to get a refund. By screaming at a young person who had no authority and probably no say in setting policy, she reduce her chances of achieving her goal, of getting her refund. How likely is the clerk to find a supervisor and otherwise work with this customer if the customer is screaming at her?

More on this next post. Bottom line: always keep your goal in mind when you start communicating. It’s like driving a car. If you know where you are going, where you want to end up, you’re going to take turns, roads, etc. to get you there. Otherwise you’re just driving (or communicating) endlessly.

This was excerpted from my book Why Did I Say That? Communicating to keep your credibility, your cool, and your cash! For more information on critical, relationship-saving communicaton, customer service, and conflict resolution issues, go to www.mooreoncommunication.com/products

I give net proceeds to great charities. Please help us out and get some great books and books on CDs in the process….at a discount.

Till next week,

Ronnie Moore

Tagged as: communication