Tag: Customer Service Page 4 of 8

Team

On April 23, 2014

Your most important customer is your own team.

Treat your colleagues as though they know everything you do. Wait for them to ask questions if they have them, and if they do, don’t punish them by reverting to a position of condescension. Don’t be the reason someone dreads coming to work, or the reason someone leaves. — The Pastry Box Project: Jan 16

I’ve always gone in to new jobs with this attitude. We were all hired to do a job. That means we all best out others for the job. We are, to some degree, qualified to hold the position and do the work.

I never talk down to my co-workers. They are my team. We are a team. And I gain nothing by being condescending to them. If someone doesn’t understand something and asks, I’ll happily explain what I mean. I love to share what I’ve learned in the course of my work. It makes the team better when I share my knowledge.

We all have strengths and interests. I have been the Mac Guy. But I need the Excel Guy and the Photoshop Woman to be successful. We all have our strengths. And when our knowledge falls short we use the teams’ knowledge.

Working in a team is like the Borg Collective. Resistance is Futile because between us, we can solve any problem.

It appalls me to see people working in support positions put down their teammates.

You see these people everyday. They know you. They can be your biggest strength or your greatest weakness. It’s your decision. But know you’re throwing away a huge asset if you choose to abandon your team.

The web is made of people

By Carl

On March 21, 2014

In Observations

The best thing you can do for your customers is to stop thinking of them as customers.

Think of us as people.

You are helping people. You are serving people. You are a people yourself. A specific people. A person. You are a person. I am a person.

We’re all persons. Each of us have feelings. We can hurt. We get angry. We are sad. We take things out on strange people because we don’t know them.

We are all people. Think about that when you see the tweet mention you or your company. Think about that when an email comes in. It was sent from a person.

It’s easy to forget that we’re all people sitting at our keyboards or smartphones. The words and pictures aren’t generated by computers or monkeys. It all comes from people.

People who can hurt. People who are irrational. People who have bad days.

We’re not replying to eyeballs. We’re not talking to clicks. A page view has never dissed you on Twitter. Every interaction you have is with a real live person. Treat them like people!

We are not users.
We are not customers.
We are not clicks, page views or eyeballs.
We are people.
And deserve to be treated that way.

Slow Down

By Carl

On October 23, 2013

In Observations

Working in support is overwhelming. It’s easy to fire off a quick reply or pick up the phone for a call and be short with your customer. I’ve done it.

I’ve fired off an email without thinking it through and I left out some important information. Or I looked back on it after I’d hit send and realized I sounded rude or annoyed and did not mean to.

Every time I have made a blunder, it could have easily been avoided had I done one simple thing. Slow Down.

It’s easy to rush when the phone is ringing, emails are piling up and my ticket queue is growing ever larger. Speed is a necessary part of getting work done and helping customers. However, being reckless serves no one.

When I go too fast, I make mistakes and have to redo my work. And when I make mistakes, the customer is not being served so I’m right back where I started.

Slow down. Take a breath. Proceed when you’re ready. There is a difference working quickly and working recklessly. Customers appreciate speed. They love having work done quickly and correctly.

Reckless work means having to redo work. Reckless work means having unhappy customers. Slowing down is the best thing you can do for your customers.

Beyond the Reboot #5: Basic Acting Skills

By Carl

On September 23, 2013

In Observations

Everyone has bad days. Everyone enjoys the weekend a little too much or stays up all night sometimes. We all have bad days where the last thing we want to do is to go to work and help people with their problems. Providing great service means a little acting.

It doesn’t take much to put on a face of friendliness and concern when going to help your customers. If you’re in a bad mood, it can quickly rub off on the customer and they can feel like they’re inconveniencing you and they may become irritated or hostile. Remember, it is your job to help them and if you project negativity, they may respond in kind.

Stay positive and fake it if you don’t feel it. Just as you’re reading your customer’s emotions, they’ll be reading yours and if you’re upset or grumpy, it will not lead to a good experience.

If you don’t feel it, fake it. If you wear a smile on your face long enough, you’ll start to feel happier. Then your great service skills will shine through and you’ll start to feel better once you’ve helped your customer.

Recently, I went to go help an executive who was having a problem with Powerpoint. He had a new version of the application installed and was having some trouble finding a specific setting he needed.

When I arrived, he was already throwing F-bombs and very irritated. This particular person has no patience for computers and if they didn’t work as expected, it was nuclear war.

I knew this would take the best acting performance of my career to get out of this unscathed. I walked in with a huge smile on my face and summoned all my patience on this early, Monday morning and endured. I asked, “I hear you are having problems with Powerpoint, how can I help?” I endured the screaming and the yelling and the assault to my profession and myself.

I tried my best to help the customer with his problem but in the end, he was too angry to explain what he needed.. I could not get enough information out of him to understand what he was looking for. So he dismissed me and I left his office and returned to my own.

My first call was to my manager to explain what had just taken place. My second call was to my team lead to warn her of what had just happened. She was next in line to deal with him. My third call was to the wild. I took a walk around the campus to cool down so I would not bring the negativity of that exchange my other customer interactions.

Another important acting lesson is never making the customer feel stupid. In the past few weeks I have removed an SD Card from a slot-loading CD-ROM drive, plugged in a network cable to restore internet access, turned on a power strip to restore a non-working computer to life and plugged a USB cable in to repair a broken printer.

In each instance, the customers all apologized for having me come to see them for a very simple fix. In each case, I told them not to be sorry. I am here to fix problems big and small. They have jobs to do that don’t involve crawling around on the floor and checking cables. The customer doesn’t need to know how everything connects and works.

In talking with one of the scientists I support, she said to me. “I’m so glad you understand computers. Because I don’t at all.” To which I replied, “I’m so glad you’re trying to cure cancer. Because I have no clue how to do that.”

We all have our roles to play and it’s through support and help that we’re all able to get through our days a little better off than when we started. I take great pleasure in putting on a show for my customer so they don’t feel silly or stupid. I will act whatever part is required to calm or reassure my customers because when they’re happy, I’m happy.

Beyond the Reboot #3: Ability to Empathize

By Carl

On September 16, 2013

In Observations

Time to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Once you know the problem and are communicating, show some empathy. Don’t just say you understand their problems. Show them you understand what they’re going through. They have hit upon a problem they can’t solve and it is frustrating them and preventing them from doing their work and getting on with their day.

Even if the problem is simple in your eyes, it could be a huge deal to your customer. Today, I got an urgent call from a customer who had lost the connection to two network drives. Now, to me it is a very simple thing to remap a network drive. To my customer, her data was gone and she did not know how to get it back. She was very upset.

I arrived quickly and assured her all of her data was safe. She had only lost access to the data, not the data itself. I explained what had happened and how I was going to get it back as I worked.

I mapped the drives and I saved them as shortcuts so if they became disconnected again, she could still access her data. I also showed her how to remap the drives so she could do what I had done next time. I gave her the tools to solve the problem in the future.

Recently, I got another call from a customer who thought she had lost 300 pictures of her son from her Blackberry. They were just gone! One minute they were there, in the pictures app and the next, they were nowhere to be found.

I calmly took the phone from her and checked the settings for a media card. I saw there was no recognized card. So I removed the phone from its case, popped open the back and removed the battery to find the tiny card has slipped from its slot.

Reseating the card in its slot, I explained that her photos were most likely on the card which had come loose so the phone wasn’t able to see it. I replace the battery, powered on the phone and she customer was relieved to see her son smiling back at her.

She asked how she could backup the photos so this didn’t happen again. So I walked with her to her desk. We plugged her phone into her desktop and added the phone as a media drive. We then found the Blackberry external drive under My Computer and inside the Pictures folder were her irreplaceable photos.

I assisted her in backing them up to her computer so she could sort them and then save them.

In both cases, I immediately empathized with my customer. They were both frantic, afraid they had lost important data. I reassured them their data was safe and only moments away from being recovered. I made them feel better. I fixed the problem. Then I explained how to fix the problem should it arise again.

All that stands between feeling helpless and confident is a little knowledge. Even if she doesn’t remember what I showed her today, she can be confident in the future if this happens again it is not a crisis, but an inconvenience.

You are a trusted ally to your customer. It can be hard to remember sometimes, especially when you’ve worked in the industry a long time. It can often feel like you wear a badge that says Whipping Boy but you are the customer’s hero. You are the lifeline in the battle between man and machine. Listen to what your customer is saying but also how they are saying it. Understand their emotions and react accordingly.