Business Calcium Blog

Do You Make These 3 Customer Service Mistakes?

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Focusing on Customer Service is something a lot of companies say they do, but just because you say you focus on it doesn’t mean your customers will believe you. A customer can tell when you’re simply blowing smoke, so these are three important things you should consider:

1. Don’t hide behind some list of guarantees. We learned this over a few years. We even had something we called the “7 Promises”. But in the end, customers don’t respond to lists of guarantees, they respond to people. So rather than making it easy to find your guarantees, make it easy to find your people. Put your phone number on each page, prominently, and add live chat to your website. If you have a phone tree on your 800 number, get rid of it. Have it ring directly to a person.

2. Don’t have any policies. “Policy” is a dirty word at Headsets.com. If you call us on the phone, you won’t hear someone say “our policy is …” or “that’s against our policy.” Nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear “What I can do for you is …”. Your representative should be working for the customer, not for the company. I know someone who worked his way through college and grad school as a waiter, consistently getting better tips than the other servers at his restaurant. I asked him what his secret was and he told me that whenever anyone asked for anything that wasn’t apparent on the menu, he never said “Yes” or “No.” He always said “I’ll find out what I can do for you”, or something similar. His customers appreciated that he was taking ownership of the situation, and whether the answer was yes or no, he always gave the impression that he was working directly for the customer, and not for the company.

3. Don’t avoid accountability. Recently I ordered a photo frame from an online company, and it came from them with a weird chemical smell. I called them up and they told me “Oh yeah, that’s just a chemical coating. If you put it outside for a few days, it will probably go away.” When I said I wanted them to send me a replacement, they mailed me a UPS tag so I could pack it up and send it back before they would replace it. At Headsets.com, if we ever sent you something that wasn’t exactly what you wanted we would say “I’m sorry” and send a new one immediately. If your customer calls and says something isn’t the way they want it, it doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is. It’s your fault now. Fix it for the customer. Immediately. This is the story you want your customer to tell people.

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