Month: March 2019

Be a Bridge, Not a Wall

Contacting a company requires effort. Your customer has to find the company’s contact information, figure out what they want to ask, make the time to email or call. So even customers who are just asking for additional information have already experienced some pain points. Now they’ve reached you. Are you there to help them, or to hinder them?

When I first started in customer care, customer service was often touted as “the first line of defense.” Defense? You’re trying to protect yourself from…customers? That should be the opposite of what you want to do. You want to build relationships with your customers, you want them to join the fold and go forth and spread the word about not only what an amazing product you have but about what an awesome company you are to deal with.

Your customer care department should serve as the bridge that leads your customers in, not the wall that keeps them out.

Your customer care department should serve as the bridge that leads your customers in, not the wall that keeps them out. This doesn’t mean “the customer is always right” (a fallacy I’ll talk about in a separate post). It means that your reps need to make your customers feel as if they have an advocate within the company (and your reps should actually be that advocate).

 

It is important to remember, too, that bridges work both ways. If there is information your company needs to make sure customers have, your customer care team should know about it so they can keep customers informed. Sometimes, that will be a policy or technological limitation that will make the customer unhappy. That’s okay. If your reps have built that advocacy relationship with the customer, they will still feel like they are part of the company’s team, and know that you are all working together to make your product or service as great as it can be.

The Case for Dropping the Phone

Not all that long ago, if you had a question about or problem with a product the norm was to call the company. Even when online commerce became common, most companies still provided a phone number in addition to an email address as a way to quickly get in touch. But Amazon, from the very beginning, made it very difficult to find their phone number. They offered extensive FAQs and it was pretty easy to find their email or use their contact forms, but it was very, very difficult to talk to person on the phone.

This was an absolute genius move on their part. Phone calls take exponentially longer to resolve than emails, especially those related to predictable problems. If you can predict — as Amazon could, when they were just in the business of selling books online — the majority of the issues your customers will encounter, you can have systems in place to handle those issues quickly and efficiently.

For example, let’s say I ordered a book from Amazon and it arrived with a torn cover. If I called, there would be pleasantries to dispense with, and then the CSR would have to find my order, and then I would have to describe the damage (which might take awhile, depending on how wordy and/or upset I was), and then the CSR would have to tell me what next steps were, and then I might want to argue, or I might have missed something and need them to explain again, and so on. We close up with more pleasantries and perhaps some small talk about the weather if I’m feeling chatty that day, and that simple return has now taken at least 10 minutes, maybe closer to 20.

That same exchange, conducted over email, would take half that time. Less, once you’ve got a handle on the issue and a procedure in place to handle it. Plus, any promises made by the CSR or requests made by the customer are in writing and easily accessible by all parties. Although there may be some initial frustration to your customers as they are still in the mindset of “talking to a person,” you will be able to quickly demonstrate through speedy resolution that there is no need for a phone call.

The key is that your responses to customer queries do need to be speedy and, even more importantly, accurate. Your CSRs absolutely must read and parse what your customers have written. They must know the questions to ask to tease the information they need out of your customers quickly and efficiently. With the right CSRs and the right procedures in place, you will save both your company and your customers time and money by making email your primary communication tool. Everybody wins!