Tag: customer service

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Healthcare Call Centers

Go Beyond the Call  

Seek Ways to Solve Caller’s Pain Points

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

As a medical call center your job is to answer healthcare-related calls and respond to each one efficiently. Yet what if this isn’t what the patient needs? To paraphrase and old saying, sometimes we can win the battle but lose the war. That’s why we need to go beyond the call.

Being efficient sometimes gets in the way of truly winning. Call centers have a lot of metrics to track. These help us quantify results, but they may not measure outcomes. We need to find a balance between efficiency and patient-centric results.

Here are some ideas:

Offer Empathy

Sometimes callers need to know you heard them just as much as they need their issue addressed. This requires listening and offering empathy. Correcting a caller’s issue but doing so abruptly or without listening to them leaves the caller more frustrated than satisfied.

To you, they are one more call in a busy day. But to them you may be the most important call they’ll make all day.

Pursue Resolution

Other times what a patient asks for isn’t what they need—not really. Yet a passive-aggressive response results in answering the question, while not resolving the problem.

For example, a patient might ask for the web address of your online portal so they can check the results of a recent test. You give them the address because that’s what they asked for. Yet you know the results they want won’t be available for at least another day. Do you tell them that, even though it’s not what they asked? Can you suggest a different method for them to get the results quicker?

Anticipate Problems

Let’s say a patient calls to verify the location of where they need to go for an appointment with a specialist. You give them the address.

They didn’t ask about parking, but you know that’s an issue that frustrates many people. So, you can go the extra mile and let them know where they should park and how much time to allow themselves so they can arrive at the specialist’s office without being frazzled or out of breath.

Stay on the Line

Back to our caller who asked for the web address. You can give it to them and get off the call. Or you can give it to them and stay on the line to see if they have any more questions. Maybe they wrote it down wrong. If you’re still connected, you can clarify it, instead of making them call back a second time.

Or you can help them navigate the site, offering a quick tip that will save several minutes of frustration on their part. The point is, don’t end the call prematurely. If you think they’ll need help, the best approach may be to stick around.

Putting These Tips into Practice

You may acknowledge that while these are insightful ideas, they’re not practical for your busy call center and that you can’t afford to implement them. But recall the concept of winning the battle and losing the war.

That means the better perspective is that perhaps you can’t afford not to.

Think about it.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Read his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Telephone Answering Service

Look for Ways to Better Serve Your Clients

Seek Initiatives to Stand Out from Your Competition

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

You’re proud of your telephone answering service; at least I hope you are. You strive to serve your clients and their callers well. You do things with excellence. You relish the fact that you facilitate hundreds or thousands of communication efforts every day.

Yet your competitors feel the same way. Every answering service does.

So how can you stand out? What can you do to differentiate yourself from every other service, which seems to most people to be just as impressive as yours?

You should focus on providing quality service; everyone does. It’s not a distinguishing factor anymore but an expectation.

Instead look for ways to better serve your clients. Here are some areas to consider.

Inquiries

The first idea to better serve your clients is to start before they become your customer. One area to look at is the amount of time from when they click on your ad to when they’re having a true conversation with someone on your team. An automated response or AI-powered bot doesn’t count. Only true human interaction matters.

Strive to shorten this time as much as possible. Establish systems to aid in this effort, and reform your sales staff’s perspectives of the imperative need to respond right away.

Onboarding

Once you’ve closed the sale, the next step is setting up their account and beginning to answer calls. Again, measure the time from when they commit—such as submitting paperwork or signing an online form—to when you answer their first call.

Streamline this process is much as possible. Cut bureaucratic steps. Look to do functions in tandem rather than sequentially.

Yet balance speed with completeness.

Don’t subject them to a generic solution within an hour or even a few minutes with the goal to add the details later. This will give them a negative first impression of your answering service, one from which you might never recover.

The goal is to minimize the time from when they hire you to when you’re providing complete, first-class service. The longer you take, the more opportunity they have for buyer’s remorse to sit in. Take too long and they could cancel service before they even start.

Message Delivery

The TAS industry has made great progress in better serving clients with all the innovative options in your arsenal of tools to get them their messages and information quickly and effectively. Yet most of these capabilities exist on your platform, which means every other answering service has these options at their disposal as well.

Look for other innovative ways to help your customers with their communication needs, delighting them in the process. This will be a key distinguishing characteristic to better serve your clients.

Billing

Have you ever received an invoice that was hard to understand? Did it contain descriptions that didn’t make sense or line items that delineated information that confused you?

Do the invoices your answering service sends carry these same issues?

Information on most invoices reflect what the business needs to better manage the financial aspect of their operation. The side effect is a less-than-ideal presentation to customers.

This is backward. Don’t frustrate your customers with a confusing invoice just because it is what works best for you.

Redo your invoicing with a customer-first mentality to better serve your clients.

Problem Resolution

Though we wish problems never arose with the service we provide to our clients, they do. The obvious solution is to strive to minimize the occurrence of problems in the first place.

Yet when they do pop up, how you react is critical. This includes how quickly you respond and how accurately you resolve the problem. A third, but often overlooked, element is how the customer reacts to your efforts. If you’ve corrected their concern and they don’t realize it, you still lost.

Moving Forward to Better Serve Your Clients

As you review this list of areas for improvement, pick the one that offers the biggest potential impact to your customers. Then work toward improving it. This will help you better serve your clients and stand out from your competition.

Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Healthcare Call Centers

Tips to Deal with Angry Callers

Prepare How to Best Handle Abusive Callers

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

People today, it seems, are more demanding and less tolerant than they once were. They want immediate answers and have little patience to wait.

This unfortunate trend may be even more pronounced when speaking to someone over the telephone. This is the reality of angry callers that our medical call centers must deal with.

Author Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Here are some strategies to address this troubling issue:

Tips For Management

Determining an appropriate response to angry callers starts with call center leadership. Implement these ideas for your call center or organization to support your frontline people when they encounter a difficult phone call:

Have a Plan

Develop a written strategy for how agents should best respond to and deal with angry callers. This goes beyond well-sounding platitudes and should offer practical, actionable steps.

This includes recommendations for how agents should react to volatile callers and the options you recommend for them to deal with the aftermath.

Communicate the Plan

Share your strategy with your staff. Teach it during their initial training, reinforce it in ongoing instruction, and make it readily available to all parties: your frontline staff, your supervisors, and your managers.

Support Your Staff

Let your staff know that you care how they are treated. The off-repeated adage that “the customer is always right” isn’t always true. Sometimes callers are wrong, unreasonable, or mean.

Let your agents know that you have their back.

Offer Options

In most instances, when an agent hangs up from one phone call, there’s another one waiting in queue.

The goal, in normal situations, is for the agent to immediately go to the next call. But after an extremely difficult interaction, they may not be at their best to assist the next caller right away.

Give them options to take in extreme cases. Else they risk turning one bad call into a string of bad calls. One idea is allowing them to take themselves out of rotation for a moment to regain their composure.

Extreme cases may warrant taking an early break. Just place appropriate guidelines on when these steps are applicable.

Tips For Agents

I hope your call center has provided instruction and tools to help you deal with angry callers who won’t calm down. Always follow their policy.

But if you’re in a position without the needed direction, here are some ideas you can use to better cope with abusive callers. Exercise care, however, to use these sparingly, especially as you move down the list.

Also, your organization may have given you variations on these techniques, so follow their processes. And don’t be alarmed if your call center prohibits one or more of these options, particularly the last one.

Know that they have a good reason for doing so. Respect it and follow their wishes.

Lower Your Voice

It’s in our nature to raise our voice in response to someone who raises theirs. This just escalates the situation. Instead do the opposite. Talk more softly. They’re apt to do the same. And even if they don’t, it will calm you.

Take Five

Sometimes a five-second respite at the conclusion of a phone call can help. Close your eyes, inhale slowly, exhale slowly, and quiet your emotions. Do a shoulder roll to release tension.

Press Hold

When a caller escalates out of control, place them on hold under the guise of needing to check something. Maybe you actually do, and you’ll be able to accomplish it more effectively if they aren’t venting their anger in the process.

But even if you don’t need to check something, use this time to refocus yourself. Hopefully, they’ll calm down a bit as well. Just make sure you politely and patiently explain to them that you will place them on hold before pressing that button.

Pass Off the Call

Do you have a supervisor or manager who can help you deal with difficult callers?

Sometimes your coworker sitting next to you can serve as an ad hoc “supervisor” to take a difficult caller that you’re not connecting with. Of course, be willing to do the same when they have a difficult conversation of their own.

Know That It’s Not Personal

Most angry callers are mad at your organization, and they take it out on you as its representative. Know that their frustration isn’t personally directed at you. This understanding puts a buffer between their emotions and your self-esteem.

Though this is easier to say than to do, acknowledging that their anger isn’t personal may help you take an emotional step back from a volatile situation.

But Sometimes It Is Personal

Sometimes, however, an angry caller becomes abusive and attacks you personally. They may call you a name, question your intelligence, or worse. These direct attacks sting.

It becomes personal. You can’t separate yourself from their emotion because they just verbally assaulted you.

If this occurs and none of the above options help, you’re justified in telling the caller that their behavior is inappropriate. Explain that you want to help, but until they calm down you won’t be able to.

If they persist, warn them that you’ll need to disconnect their call. If they don’t soften their demeanor, hang up on them.

Conclusion

Though you can do little to change how abusive callers treat you, you do have control over how you respond. Follow these ideas to help you successfully move forward.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Healthcare Call Center Essentials, available in hardcover, paperback, and e-book.

Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of AnswerStat and Medical Call Center News covering the healthcare call center industry. Read his latest book, Sticky Customer Service.

Categories
Business

How to Deal with Difficult Customers

A Personal Note to Frontline Customer Service Staff

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Anyone who’s worked in a support role knows how difficult it can be. Yes, some customers—hopefully most—are easy to work with and appreciative of your responses. They may even thank you for your help. Celebrate each one of these wins and use them to shape your outlook for the day.

Yet other customers, hopefully a minority, are challenging. They’re agitated before they even reach you, and if you don’t provide the answers they seek, their ire escalates. Even though you aren’t the cause of the problem that prompted them to contact you, they dump their frustration on you anyway, sometimes erupting into a personal attack. This isn’t fair. It isn’t right. But it happens.

First, know that everyone who contacts you makes a choice in how they treat you. They can choose to interact with you in a respectful and humane way. Or they can choose to let their emotions control the words they say and how they speak to you. This is on them, not you. This explanation doesn’t excuse their behavior, but it helps us better understand it.

Next, your responses to these difficult customers can defuse the situation or worsen it. Just as their decision of how to treat you is within their control, your reaction to them is within yours. 

Here are some tips to defuse difficult customer service situations.

Remain Calm

It’s hard to maintain your composure amid confrontation. Yet this is key to successfully dealing with challenging people. Don’t mirror their unruly behavior and reflect their negativity. Instead, counter their inappropriate conduct with an appropriate response.

If your interaction is over the phone, don’t forget to breathe. This will help you relax. It also releases tension. Remember to smile. A smile on your face will ease helpful words out of your mouth. Some reps place a small mirror on their desk to remind them to smile. Callers will hear your smile. Also be professional, treating them as you would want them to treat you. 

Though not as critical when you’re not on the phone, these tips to breathe, smile, and be professional also apply to online interactions, such as text chat, email, and social media.

Pause

If you feel emotion building up inside of you that might cause you to say something that’s not helpful, pause. If you’re on the phone, you can ask them to hold while you “look something up.” The same applies to chat. You can also introduce a pause into email and social media support without the customer even knowing it. 

When receiving an emotion-filled email, I make myself wait an hour before responding, sometimes even waiting until the next day. My delayed communication is always more constructive than what I would have typed at first.

Regardless of how you pause a customer interaction, the purpose is for you to refocus your attention on producing a positive outcome and to ensure you don’t respond negatively and escalate the situation.

End Positively

Regardless of the customer service outcome, make sure you conclude it positively. You can thank the customer for contacting you—even if you don’t want to say so. Or end by telling them to enjoy the rest of their day. 

This accomplishes two things. 

For the customer, it may cause them to rethink what just happened, hopefully putting their day on a different trajectory. 

For you, it helps set the tone for your next customer interaction. It signals to your mind and body that the difficult interaction is over, and it’s time to embrace the next one with a fresh outlook.

Take a Break

Sometimes after you complete a negative customer service interaction, you need time to move past it. This makes sure you don’t carry the unpleasant situation you just endured into your next call. 

You may need to take a break. 

Most employers understand this and allow their customer service reps the latitude to take this step as needed. This action, however, should be rare and not the norm. If your employer doesn’t allow this, then do what you can to interject a short pause into your workflow after a difficult call.

Customer Service Success Tip

Work to make every customer interaction produce a positive outcome. Celebrate your successes. Learn how to better deal with difficult customers. Don’t let one rude customer ruin your day.

Working in customer service has many rewarding moments. Don’t lose sight of them.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.

Categories
Business

Frontline Customer Service Staff

Work to Make Your Support Staff’s Job Easier

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

A common thread throughout these posts is that a person—not a department or an organization—provides customer support. The two exceptions are self-service and automated bots, but even these often require—or, at least, should require—an actual person to back them up.

This means that your frontline employees are key to customer service success. You play a role in their work, their workload, and their associated attitude. Look for ways to make their jobs easier. Here are some actions you can take to better support them, to increase positive outcomes, and to improve their job outlook.

Review Policies

Look at your organization’s procedures and rules. Do these help your customer service staff do their job better or do these items make their work harder? Balance your policies between business acumen and customer service workload. Often, well-meaning business directives subject your staff to unnecessary customer complaints and workplace frustration. 

For example, one employer I worked for had an internal policy that all payments were net 45, instead of paying within the standard thirty days, which most every company expects. This caused me to spend way too much time fielding calls from frustrated vendors about delayed payments.

Empower Staff

Give your employees the authority to do the right thing for your customers. This is especially true in situations where managers have the latitude to make these decisions. Forcing customers to escalate their concerns causes more work for managers and diminishes the customer service personnel in the eyes of the caller.

Provide Supervisory Support

You can help customer service employees with wise supervision. This isn’t to monitor their behavior but to assist with difficult interactions. Sometimes a customer and an employee will not mesh, no matter how hard the employee tries. Doing a handoff to a supervisor (or even a seasoned coworker) can turn an ill-fated contact into a successful one.

Fix Problems First

How much of the customer service work that your staff does results from problems your company caused? This can result from an email sent too soon, a letter mailed to the wrong customers, or a website that contains misinformation. Avoid or fix these issues to keep customers from contacting support because of your company’s self-inflicted problems.

A confusing or hard-to-navigate website is another unnecessary source of customer service work. Even worse is a website that’s broken. I once tried for three days to update my credit card number on a vendor’s website, only to receive an error message each time. When I finally reached someone in support, she immediately understood the situation. “Sorry, but that section of our website isn’t working correctly.” I wonder how many needless chat sessions she, and her coworkers, endured because of this website problem.

Celebrate Their Work

Always do what you can to acknowledge the efforts of your customer service staff. Celebrate their positive outcomes and excellent work. Say, “Thank you.” 

This occurs directly with your words, both in person and written. Notes, emails, and memos of heart-felt appreciation go a long way to affirm the work of a too-often underacknowledged but essential part of your operation. Acknowledging their work also occurs tangibly with their paychecks and compensation packages. 

I once had a boss who combined these two elements. On Fridays he would deliver our checks. He’d walk into my office, hand me my paycheck, and say “thank you.” Then he’d leave to deliver the next one.

Never lose sight of the critical role you play in thanking your customer service staff for their work. This isn’t a once-and-done action, but an ongoing initiative.

Customer Service Success Tip

Make your support staff’s job easier by removing roadblocks that impede them from doing their job.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.

Categories
Business

Good Customer Service Keeps Its Promises

Say What You’ll Do and Do What You Say

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

Repeated stories in these posts relate to cell phone companies. It’s a sad commentary on the industry, yet these lessons apply to all businesses. 

For cell phone companies, a disregard for existing customers and preference for new business drives existing customers to their competitors every two years. I have ample stories to share, none of them good. 

What’s interesting is that each switching cycle starts online and may shift to the telephone before moving to in-person to finalize the transaction. Once completed, interaction may move back to the telephone for a time before reverting to online for the long term. There is a significant disconnect between these channels. 

Through the decades of the every-other-year carrier switch, I can recall none that occurred as expected. None ingratiated me to my new provider, and each one took too much time. Most incurred unexpected charges or hidden fees. Hidden is a generous word. Lied to is more common.

No carrier stands above the others in treating customers right and attempting to hold on to the ones they have rather than continually churn them.

A New Twist

Though our existing carrier was content to continue service under the terms of our original agreement, they took no steps beyond that to keep our business. It was only through the work of an independent sales unit that we learned of a plan that worked for us and would not force us to switch providers.

Key to this was a generous trade-in allowance for our existing phones. Factoring the credit into our calculations would allow us to upgrade our phones at no cost and enjoy a slight decrease in our monthly rate. It seemed too good to be true.

We scrutinized the fine print in their offer and found no flaw. The decision to upgrade service was easy. After confirming the details of their offer, we committed to move forward. Switching took much longer than it should, which happens each time we upgrade. But we walked out of the store with our new phones and began transferring information so we could use them and then return the old units.

A Shocking Development

After wiping the memory on our old phones and shipping them in to receive our trade-in rebates, we encountered a shock. They reviewed our working phones, listed made up problems, and downgraded our promised rebates to less than 10 percent of what we expected. The carrier was unwilling to discuss this. The discrepancy between their promise and their reality was a couple thousand dollars.

An online search for resolutions revealed many people who felt similarly duped. The only successful recourse was to wait three months for the final determination and then reporting them to the Better Business Bureau. Once aggrieved customers filed their complaints, the carrier made good on their promise.

That’s not a wise business strategy. 

Customer Service Success Tip

Uncover times your customers may have felt tricked by your marketing promotions and customer retention initiatives. Eliminate these disparities between fact and fiction.

If you don’t address these issues, you’ll alienate customers. And they’ll tell everyone they can, further hurting your chances of gaining new business.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.

Categories
Business

The Name Game

Use Names to Facilitate Effective Communication and Not Obscure It

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

In “The Perfect Answer,” we talked about using your name when answering phone calls. This makes a personal connection with the caller and facilitates productive communication to result in positive outcomes.

Besides phone calls, names are equally important for online and in-person communication. Here are some further thoughts on names.

The Alias

A friend once worked for a collection agency. All day he placed calls to people who owed money to his clients. Since he was attempting to contact people who didn’t want to be found, he often met with opposition and even threats. Because of this, he never used his actual name and adopted an alias for his work. 

This was a company policy to protect employees from reprisals by those they pursued. Since he presented himself as a named person, he met with more success than he would’ve had he been a nameless voice from the dreaded collection agency.

As a side effect, assuming a new name enabled him to adopt a different persona at work. Contrary to his mellow personality, his collection agency character allowed him to become a determined sleuth unaffected by avoidance tactics and threats of retaliation.

In this case, using an alias was both safe and effective.

The Switch 

While attending a banquet, it surprised me to see a friend working there as a server. Chloe shared that she took this occasional part-time work to earn extra money. After chatting a while, I glanced at her name tag. It said “Jennifer.”

She smiled. “They make us wear name tags, but they never said we had to wear our own. So, we all switch.” Her eyes twinkled with excitement. “Sometimes I swap with Jeremy.”

Though Chloe could pass as Jennifer, she certainly didn’t look like a Jeremy.

This was a fun way to add some variety to a fast-paced and demanding job. Yet her admission gave me pause. I wondered what else she and her coworkers were doing, contrary to the expectation of management. The staff’s reaction to their employer’s name policy hinted to workplace problems. I wondered if these issues affected their patrons in a negative way. 

If your staff engages in passive-aggressive behavior, look for the underlying cause and then fix it.

The Alternate

I once had an employee with an unusual name: Johnene. When answering the phone, she always gave her name as trained. Too often, however, callers asked her to repeat it. Growing tired of this, she tried a shortened version, Johnnie. Callers now understood her name, but many repeated it with a question in their voice to confirm they heard right. She then tried John, but that made things worse. Next, she even used Joan for a bit, but it didn’t feel right and confused her coworkers. She reverted to Johnene.

Sometimes names can impede communication, delaying the resolution that callers seek. It may facilitate customer service to use an alternate, more common name. But not always. 

Multiple times I’ve called companies and had a heavily accented representative—who I suspected was halfway around the world—tell me his name was Jeff or Mike. I seriously doubted that. I realize he did this because I was unlikely to understand his actual name or be able to repeat it. Yet with such an obvious mismatch between his accent and stated name, I felt duped, distracting me from accomplishing my goal.

A better solution than to adopt a common American-sounding name might be to use a nickname or the first syllable or two of his actual name. These options would better bridge the culture implied by his accent and the goal to facilitate quick caller resolution. 

The Bot

More companies are using bots for customer service. Guided by artificial intelligence, bots are computer programs that communicate with customers in a way that mimics human interaction. The goal is for people to never know they’re chatting with a computer program and not an actual person.

Though I have no way of knowing how many times a bot has fooled me into thinking “Larry” was real, I know that sometimes the person I assumed I was chatting with turned out to be fake. The tipoff comes as our conversation progresses and the bot becomes less helpful. Then the bot types, “Let me get someone who can help you with that.”

I recently reached out to a tech company for help. I knew the initial interaction would be computerized, but they pleased me when the chat window listed the agent’s name as “Bot.” This left no doubt that I was interacting with a computer program and they weren’t trying to deceive me. Bot understood what I needed and routed me to the right person. We’ll call this a customer service win.

Does your company use bots to trick people or help them?

Customer Service Success Tip

Consider how your employees—and apps—use names when interacting with customers. Remember that the goal is effective service. Make sure your policy on using names keeps this in mind.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.

Categories
Business

Provider-Inflicted Pain

Balance Business Needs with Customer Impact

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

It’s a hassle when our credit card changes. We must track down every business that has our credit card number on file and update it. If we miss one company, we risk service interruptions or delivery problems.

Sometimes we decide to switch cards, but what about when our credit card company makes this change? Through no fault of our own, they force us to use a new card with a different number. This doesn’t happen often, but I have experienced it with both my personal and business accounts.

The most recent occurrence happened to me with the branded card I used for all my business purchases. They aligned with a different credit card provider, and I paid the price for that decision. I’m sure it made sense for them, but did they consider how this would affect their customers?

The Personal Impact

The first to update were the companies that automatically charged my card each month. The process to correct this was straightforward, albeit time-consuming. I looked at last month’s statement and listed everyone I needed to contact. Then I went online to provide my new credit card information. Though time-consuming and tedious, this step wasn’t hard. Some sites made updating my credit card information easy, but other sites buried this information or made the process more challenging.

But what about all the companies that had my credit card number on file, but I hadn’t bought from them in the last month? This list was much harder to compile, and I overlooked a few. But I didn’t know I had missed them until I attempted to place an order and had my card denied—all because I forgot to update my number. This produced both frustration and embarrassment.

Business Decisions

Don’t just evaluate business changes from a financial perspective. Consider how this will impact your customers. Will your decision inconvenience them or damage your relationship with them?

Though this example is about credit cards, the lesson applies elsewhere too. Other considerations include updating software, changing password requirements, and migrating from one system to another. Before proceeding, consider how these changes will impact your customers. Look for ways to mitigate their frustration or minimize their inconvenience.

Customer Service Success Tip

When you make a business decision, consider how it affects your customers. Seek ways to ease the transition for them. Consider what you can do for them so that they won’t have to do it themselves.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.

Categories
Business

Available and Accurate Support

Minimizing the Need for Customer Service Is the Best Support Option

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

As an author, I upload my books to over a half-dozen online stores and distributors, using their respective portals to enter each book’s information and files. The interface for each one differs, with some being easy to use and others being more cumbersome. Sometimes it’s clear what information they seek, and other sites provide on-page tips to answer essential questions. 

Each one of these online destinations offers a degree of customer support. 

Questionable Results

One online bookseller, the oldest of them all, has a confusing-to-navigate website that leaves users questioning what information to enter. They offer both email and telephone support, though experience encourages me to use these options only as a last resort—and then to question the results. Given the quality of communication that occurs through both options, I assume these reps are in a different country, one far removed from mine. 

I’d be fine with this if they were easier to understand, and I trusted what they told me. Too often, however, I wonder about the accuracy of their answers. And when I really question the validity of their advice, I contact them a second time and receive a contradictory response. I don’t recall ever getting the same answer twice.

Unavailable and Delayed

Another publishing vendor offers email and text chat support. They used to be most helpful and responsive. However, in the last year this has changed. Their text chat option is unavailable most of the time, turning on and off throughout the day. Checking during posted times of availability, I’ve twice seen that chat was online, but before I could enter my question, it went off-line. 

I’ve now given up on even trying chat and use email instead. I measure their response time for email requests in weeks, not hours. The good part is that I respect their answers—at least most of the time.

Professional and Accurate

The other companies all offer just email support. 

Two of them surpass all others—not only in the publishing industry but for all e-commerce companies. Though they don’t meet my hope for a quick response, they do respond, usually by the next business day. What makes them excel, however, is the professionalism of their communications and the accuracy of their answers. 

I fully trust what they tell me.

Follow the example of these two booksellers. Make sure that your online presence is easy for customers to use and offers accessible, helpful, on-page support. If you have customers or vendors who upload information to your website, make sure the backend is equally easy to use and helpful.

Customer Service Success Tip

Make your e-commerce store easier to use, for both customers and vendors. Each improvement you make online will lessen the work your customer service support staff must do later.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.

Categories
Business

The Trials and Triumphs of Telephone Support

Phone Interactions Can Save or Ruin Your Business

By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD

A lot of customer service occurs over the telephone. This growing trend leaves me concerned about some things and excited about others.

A Shortsighted Attitude

On the negative side, consider a large telecommunications company that provides cell phone, internet, and long distance. Or a large national banking institution. You’ve heard of them both. And they’re notorious for their abysmal record of poor customer service. 

If I shared their names, there’s a good chance you or someone you know has had an unpleasant experience with them. To call it unpleasant is kind. Uncaring, unconscionable, and unethical are more accurate characterizations.

With these companies, once a nontypical problem occurs, there’s a strong likelihood they’ll never resolve it. This isn’t an overstatement. People have only so much patience. Then they give up. Excessive runaround, time spent on hold, and limited energy to pursue a satisfactory resolution end up overwhelming frustrated customers. They accept the problem or switch providers.

Although some of these companies’ frontline staff care and try their best, too many do not. Regardless, there seems to be cumbersome bureaucracy thwarting every move and complex support systems that make no allowances for nonroutine problems.

A Solution for Success

There’s an opportunity awaiting these two companies—and others like them—if they can just provide effective telephone customer service. With best-in-class phone support, their cancellation rates would plummet, and customer satisfaction levels would skyrocket. They’d receive a lot less negative press.

Are these companies simply too big or do they offer too many services to be effective? Are their help desks mismanaged, bogged down by bureaucracy, or smothered with complexity? 

I suspect the underlying reason is that upper management treats support as an expense to minimize. But exemplary customer service is good business. Investing in customer support is an investment in your future.

A Positive Outcome

I experienced the trials and triumphs of phone support after my house took a minor lightning strike. The surge affected our phone, internet, and entertainment services. I called my satellite provider and spoke with Beth in the Oklahoma call center. This was the first time I encountered a call center agent telling me her location. It seemed hokey and an overreaction to the backlash against offshore call centers, but it helped me establish a personal connection with Beth from Oklahoma. 

While waiting for various diagnostics to run, we had time to chat, which I enjoyed and found preferable to sitting in silence on hold. She soon scheduled a service call for the next day. The technician fixed the problem fast and restored service.

I wish I could say the same for my phone and internet service providers. They both required multiple phone calls. Then there were the missed commitments, wrong instructions, and conflicting information. 

That’s no way to run a business.

Customer Service Success Tip

Listen to what customers say about your service. Then do one thing to improve it. Once complete, fix the next item on the list.

Read more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s Sticky Series books, including Sticky Customer Service, Sticky Sales and Marketing, and Sticky Leadership and Management featuring his compelling story-driven insights and tips.

Peter Lyle DeHaan is an entrepreneur and businessman who has managed, owned, and started multiple businesses over his career. Common themes at every turn have included customer service, sales and marketing, and leadership and management.

He shares his lifetime of business experience and personal insights through his books to encourage, inspire, and occasionally entertain.