In my book there are 3 P’s of providing excellent customer service. Last week I discussed the first P, “People.” This week I will address the 2nd P, “Policies.”
You can have the best products, you can have fantastic employees serving your customers, you can have great pricing, but if your policies tie the hands of your fantastic employees those policies can keep them from providing the excellent customer service that your customers seek.
Back in the 1990s, when I owned a mail & parcel center in California, I remember that FedEx once told us that they had a policy that's the first agent that a customer would talk to on the phone had a certain dollar limit to which they could make a mistake right with the goal of satisfying the customer without having to get approval from a manager or put the customer on hold or any other delays.
How many times have you called a company because you were dissatisfied with a product or service, whether that be a failed delivery, a substandard product, or another issue, and either had a very long wait time on hold, or were bounced from one agent to another, usually claiming that “another department can help you better,” yet before you were finished you had spent an hour or more on the phone, your temperature and blood pressure were through the roof, and you swore you would never do business with that company again?
Yet the solution is simple. If the problem could have been solved by the first person you spoke with, you probably would have been and remained a satisfied and loyal customer. Would companies prefer that you get mad and give up so that they won’t have to send a new product, or provide a refund, or what? Sometimes my mind explodes trying to figure out the way some companies handle customer complaints.
Yes the solution is simple. You’ve hired a good employee that has a brain. You have trained them hopefully in how you would like them to treat your customers. So why not give them a chance to use that brain to apply the training, and trust them to use some common sense to make your customer happy so that they will keep spending their money with your company?
Its really not that difficult. But if you feel that you need some help in setting up the right strategy to satisfy customers while protecting the company’s interests (read profit) schedule a thirty-minute complimentary session with me and let’s have a discussion. What do you have to lose, well, unless you like losing customers. Click Here!