Customer Services Best Practices Guidelines

Dealing With Difficult Customers

How do you know when the customer has gone too far and it’s time to put your foot down and actually say “No”. This is always a difficult situation that we all hope we’ll never have to deal with, and if you haven’t to date, then you’re one of the lucky ones. Setting out your Best Practices Guidelines BEFORE the difficult customer appears will ensure that we have procedures in place to deal with it, so panic doesn’t set in if it does happen.

The first thing in creating your plan is to find out how you personally view your customers. A few factors to consider: do you treat and view your customers as friends; faceless buyers on the internet; or maybe you feel you desperately have to please everyone?

If a customer complains, wants to return something or questions the quality, response time or delivery time of your products, how do you handle it? Do you take it personally, non-chalantly or does it become something you constantly think about until they are satisfied? Knowing how you view your customers to begin with and how you first react to some kind of complaint or dissatisfaction on their part will help you decide how you feel comfortable in dealing with the foreseeable and unforseeable future.

Setting out guidelines or steps that become your best practices takes away a lot of the anxiety felt when a problem occurs AND it ensures that all customers receive the same answers and actions. You see, you can give people an outline, but their personality also definitely makes a difference as well - especially in person or on the phone.

Several things to consider:

• Put yourself in your customers shoes - how would you feel? Empathy, or the ability to recognize and feel what the other is feeling will provide you with the insight to know what your customer may expect to resolve the situation.
• Provide them with a definate resolution date or time.
• Taking an extra step - perhaps send them something for free with a note of thands for helping you to improve your product and/or service, a coupon for free shipping or a discount off of their next order.

Making the customer feel that not only did you resolve their issue, but you took it seriously enough to take those steps.

Following are the 7 basic steps for you to create your Best Practices outline:

You’ve just opened your business email and you’re confronted with a customer complaint, how do you handle it?

1. Let the initial shock take place as you read the email.
2. Once you’ve read the email, take a deep breathe and tell yourself, “Okay, there’s a problem here that needs to be addressed, but first I am going to step away from the computer for ten minutes and let the problem sink in, then I’ll come back and look at it from an objective point of view.”
3. Walk away from the computer for ten minutes. Remember that if you send an e-mail in return on impulse, you may regret the tone later. Walk away then type the answer, then walk away again and reread before sending
4. Go back to the email and re-read it again. What exactly is the problem? How can it be handled? What would satisfy the customer without hurting your pocket-book?
5. Write your thoughts down in a word document, check for grammar and spelling and then let it sit there for five minutes while you read and answer a few more emails
6. Now go back to the email. How does it sound? Are you short- tempered with your words or were you apologetic and problem-solving? Did you offer a resolution to the problem? Not sure? Ask a business associate or friend to read it over for you.
7. Once you feel the email is ready to be sent, send it out. Give the customer one day to read over your email and respond. If your customer has not replied, call him or her. Let your customer know that his (or her) satisfaction is very important to you.

Remembering our notches of best practices above including empathy, resolution time or date, thank you for bringin this to our attention free gift and assurance that some steps have been taken to ensure that won’t occur in the future (or to dimish the chances of it occuring).

Now this is great and it should be implemented by all small businesses, but there is one flaw - this is assuming that you actually can satisfy the customer - what if you can’t? How do you handle a complaint that you know you can’t fix? For instance, you know that the product they purchased is not going to change, or the class they just took was fine for hundreds of other students? You can refund their purchase, that is the standard expectation of the customer.

What about telling them that you hope that in the future they can find something that they like , or a class that will be helpful to them and offering them a discount, or referring them to another business you know will be able to satisfy what they need or are looking for? This is where networking on the internet and joint ventures come in very handy - that customer will be more likely to try you again, if you were able to satisfy them, even if it’s not with your products or services, they will remember that their satisfaction was important enough for you to get them what they needed. And, the other business will more than likely reciprocate the referral - without you even asking them to - out of appreciation.

Many people think that helping out the competition is a bad thing, but that’s not necessarily so. There are more advantages to working together than competing in most cases. Doing this gives your business referrals from that customer and from the competition - you can’t lose by sending your customers to someone who has what they want.

So, your customer service Best Practices Plan for handling customer complaints will include empathy, defining a resolution date and/or time, thank you gift, will encorporate the 7 steps of initial “reaction time” and a network of business referrals. With this type of plan in place, you should have absolutely no problem with giving your customers a 100% guarantee of satisfaction - your plan will ensure that for you giving that 100% guarantee gives the customer some comfort and having the plan in place gives you the comfort and bravery to post it on your website. The guarantee does bring in more customers - people are afraid to post that guarantee on their website and there’s reason to be - everyone should have it!

About The Author:

Dianne Fratscher is a full time entrepreneur and work at home mom who coaches others on starting and building successful home based businesses.  For more information about Dianne, visit her website at www.WahmsUnited.com