Customer Service Tip of the Week

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Build Goodwill with Co-workers and Customers - 11/10/26


All relationships are different.  We want to have good relationships with co-workers, after all – those are the people we spend the most time with each week.  We want to have good relationships with customers since they’re the ones that provide the revenue and inflows that allow us to Read more

How to Avoid “Groundhog Day” - 11/3/26


It’s Groundhog Day, where you’re living the same day over and over and over again. You have heard basically the same complaint from 4 different customers in the past week.  The bill is incorrect or confusing, and you’re having to spend a ton of time explaining things to the customer. You’ve Read more

Beware of Scary Telephone Customer Service - 10/27/26


As we near the Halloween holiday in the United States, it seems appropriate to discuss examples of scary customer service, particularly on the telephone.  Here are a few common issues that frustrate and annoy customers.  These are experiences to avoid delivering, and alternatives to adopt: The customer calls, describes their Read more

The Art of the Successful Script - 10/20/26


You’re the customer.  You go to the store, and they ask if you have a loyalty card.  You call the doctor’s office, and they ask for your birth date.   You walk up to the counter, and they ask if you found everything you were looking for. These are all valid Read more

The Key Building Block for Your Customer Relationship - 10/13/26


An automotive manufacturer gets supplies for their vehicles from all over the world.  They have arrangements, service level agreements, expectations for timing and quality of all the parts.  And when they gather all these supplies, they assemble the cars.  They test the cars.  Then they take pictures of those Read more

Be Flexible to Fill the Gaps - 10/6/26


The non-profit has the expected challenges.  There are only 3 people in the organization, yet, they have the same responsibilities of a larger company.  They have to do finance, sales, marketing; they deliver their services to the community, and they need to keep a pulse on what’s going on Read more

Is This Good Customer Service? - 9/29/26


A friend of mine reached out to me recently as she waited for the electrical technician to show up at her house to do some minor repairs.  She had never worked with this company before, but they sent a text about the tech who was soon to arrive. The message Read more

Ownership when Fixing Others’ Errors - 9/22/26


We were conducting training with a client recently, and one of the participants, Jackie, is in a role in his organization where he goes out to the customer site to investigate issues, address customer complaints, and fix problems.  While he’s at the site, he often gets an earful from Read more

Why “No” is So Important - 9/15/26


The employee told the caller: “I don’t think that is possible.” The customer eventually hung up, and redialed to ask a different employee the same question. The employee responded to the customer: “That’s probably not the best way to do it.”  Then, the customer kept asking question after question, arguing Read more

It’s Not “You,” It’s “I” - 9/8/26


During a business writing course that I took years ago, the instructor had us write an e-mail.  I can’t recall if it was written to a co-worker or customer, but after writing this e-mail, she had us count every “I” and “You.”  We talked about how we need to Read more

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Be the Good Doctor – 6/20/23

Posted on June 20, 2023 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

Ginny liked the interaction with her doctor.  She enjoyed chatting with him.  Ginny was a grandma, had been dealing with doctors all her life, and some of the interactions and experiences were better than others.

Was this doctor experienced?  Yes.  Was he intelligent?  Yes.  Was he knowledgeable of what she was going through and the potential remedies?  Again, yes.

So, when Ginny talked about why she liked the doctor so much, she could have described those different attributes.  Instead, she described his openness as the reason she enjoyed him so much.  He was as willing to convey what he didn’t yet know as well as what he did know.  He was willing to ask questions to learn more.  He was willing to listen to what Ginny said.

Your customers are often in a similar situation to Ginny when they’re dealing with you.  You are like the doctor.  Compared to the customer, you’re far more knowledgeable about issues, symptoms of problems, remedies.  You’re much more knowledgeable about the options and the pros and cons of each.  You have a lot more experience in dealing with particular situations, as well.

But oftentimes when customers appreciate you, only part of the appreciation results from the quality of the information and guidance you provide.  The rest of what may cause them to appreciate you is how open you are to ask questions, how open you are to admit what you don’t know and what additional information you need.  They may appreciate you because of your willingness to listen and be patient with them, even though you’re 95% certain that you know the best course of action in their situation.

The next time you’re working with a customer and trying to determine the best way to address their issue or goal, convey the openness of Ginny’s physician.

Be the Good Doctor.

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Trust-building in the Moment – 6/13/23

Posted on June 13, 2023 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

The customer is often the ultimate supplier of the information we need to help them.  So, we want customers to be open with us, to share their feelings, goals, issues, perceptions.

Building trust is a long-term enterprise, but many of us don’t have much time with the customer.  However, we still need the customers to be open enough to share with us so that we can be most effective in helping them.  Here are some keys to building trust in those short but important moments of truth…

Speak to what they’ve said.  The most important action is listening – asking the questions to get the information we need.  Most of the keys below are about what we say or what we convey, but it all starts with what we hear.

Speak with intent.  We need to be intentional about what we say.  Tossing in unclear words or commitments, having a tone that lacks confidence, making promises or sharing stories that don’t relate to what the customer conveyed can cause the customer to lose our main point.  It can cause them to think they haven’t been heard; they can lose confidence and trust.

Note what you can do by illustrating what you have done.  For customers to have faith that we can help, tell them what we can do, but it strengthens the story to tell them what we have done with others.  If we can illustrate a potential resolution that will be done for them by noting similar action taken for somebody else, it helps to build their trust and confidence.

Be open to engender openness.  If we want them to be open, we need to be open.  It’s hard to get somebody to share if they don’t feel like we’re willing to do likewise.  So, if you have questions that you need answered on their behalf, tell them that you need to investigate.  If you’re not 100% certain of the best option, tell them, and also let them know what you’re going to do to close that confidence gap.

Do what you said you will do.  Finally, so many of us judge trust based on whether or not the person did what they said they’d do.  This requires three things.  First, be clear with them on what we promised. This may include sending them follow-up messages to reinforce what we have verbally stated.  Second – obviously – do what we said we would do.  Third, tell them what we did.  Action is only as strong as the customer’s recognition that the action we promised actually occurred.

Tap into these 5 keys to build trust in that moment of truth.

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WOW with Welcoming – 6/6/23

Posted on June 6, 2023 in Customer Service Tip of the Week Please leave a comment

Individuals, organizations, and even communities today seem to be more overtly focused on being welcoming to others.  In customer service, being welcoming is a key to a great first impression.  But what does it mean to be welcoming?

We defined Welcoming in one of our February Tips as:  Proactively engaging others in a natural, enthusiastic, and attentive manner.  Convey the energy, active nature, and positivity that we hope to see from our customers.

There’s so much in here that is not in the typical encounter with businesses today.  And since we call “WOW Moments” Unexpected Positive Events, then being an individual who is welcoming can lead to a lot of WOWs!

If you proactively engage others upon their entry, you’ll be doing something that most businesses do not.  You notice people and reach out to them first, taking the monkey off their back by your being the one to initiate the conversation.  If you’re enthusiastic and attentive, you’re going to exceed the experiences that customers have in other organizations, which too often seem ambivalent and distracted.

If you have energy and movement, that sense of action and engagement will often be transferred to the customer.  If you are positive, then your nature will be far different, far more enjoyable than most of what people experience in much of social media, if not life, in general.  And oftentimes, customers will reflect your energy and positivity with their own upbeat reactions.

Create Unexpected Positive Events in how you start your encounter with the customer.

WOW with Welcoming.

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