You can have great products.  You can have great prices.  But the people you hire to directly deal with your customers can make or break your business with one interaction with a customer.  Sadly, I believe that most people have come to accept a lower standard of treatment in today’s market.  Many people tend to be somewhat forgiving to begin with as long as the treatment they receive does not cross a certain line.  If you or your employee display disrespect or ignores a customer that customer will probably be lost to your business.  Worse than that, the collateral damage caused by that customer telling everyone they know about their experience may be hard to overcome.

Years ago, when I owned a mail & parcel center in California, a customer service expert that had spoken at a convention I attended told us that if a customer has a good experience with your business, they might tell one or two people about it.  But if they have a negative experience, they will tell at least ten people how badly they were treated.  Today you can multiply those numbers ten-fold if not more thanks to social media.

In today’s HR world businesses are limited to their questioning of an applicant’s past work history with a previous employer.  The one question you can ask a previous employer is “Would you hire this person back again?”  I would go a step further.  If I were interviewing a candidate for a job, especially one where they will be dealing directly with customers, I would create a few questions around specific customer service examples and ask that candidate how they would handle each situation.

Not everyone is geared to deal with the public, especially in a retail setting.  My wife was very good at dealing with customers but there were certain customers that drove her bananas.  You want to hire people who preferably are people persons, and who have a desire to serve the customers.  Ask questions of the candidate that are not easily answered with a canned response that they think you want to hear.

Of course, when you hire someone you need to provide complete and proper training as to how you want the person to follow in serving your customers.  Even a good employee needs to know what you expect of them and how you want situations handled.  Do not leave it to the employee to guess, even if they seem to be a top-notch employee.  It is not fair to them, and you may not get the results you were hoping to achieve.

Next week I will discuss the second of my three P’s of excellent customer service.

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!

There are multiple options for this situation.  One option might be to politely apologize to the customer while pointing out the sign indicating the policy, then directing the customer to another register open to all.  A different option might be to serve the customer at your register with or without alerting the customer to the twelve-item limit.  Perhaps you would have the procedure to be if the customer was barely over the limit, say under fifteen items, you would help the customer without commenting on the policy.  If a customer entered the line with a full basket, then you might point out the sign and redirect them to another register.  Yes, I have seen customers go into the express lane with a full basket, totally oblivious of the sign staring them straight in the face.

As you can see there can be many ways to handle any situation.  Another possibility would be that if the store was busy and the other registers were backed up, that you would invite a customer with more than twelve items to your lane to ease the tension.  Even that can backfire, however.  Let’s say you take a customer with half a cart or more full of groceries and while you’re serving that customer, another customer comes to your lane with just a few items, noticing the Express Lane sign.  Then they see you are helping a customer with many more items.  Most customers would probably understand and not be bothered.  But there can always be that one who may be put off by having to wait for a customer who normally should not be in that lane.  Working with the public can be very trying at times.

While policies require planning and are mostly a management decision, procedures require planning and training.  I would suggest that there be a mastermind session with both management and staff to decide what procedures might be best.  This is an area where management should take input from the employees who are in the battle every day and who have seen where certain policies might not work as they had been intended.  This is also an area where having well-trained employees given a certain flexibility by management to use their wisdom is important.  We all know that old saying, “the best laid plans of mice and men….”, comes into play.  No matter how much you plan for anything, there can always be an exception to any rule. 

If you have had some issues on how to best handle situations, let’s have a discussion.  Click Here to schedule a complimentary 30-minute session with me.