Superior Support(gosquared.com) |
Superior Support(gosquared.com) |
This is absolutely flat-out wrong. Bad customers will chew up your support time, engineering resources, and mental health.
The sooner it is recognized that some customers are simply toxic, the sooner you can get rid of them. If you fail to even entertain the notion that customers might be wrong, you're doing yourself and your employees a huge disservice.
For example, a customer calls and says, "You overcharged me!" You look at the account and see that, no, the customer wasn't overcharged. The customer is right in the sense that they have through some influence of factors thought that they were overcharged. Was copy misleading? Was something not clear on one page or another?
There are a couple ways to handle this. One is where the customer is wrong: "no sir, you were not overcharged." and then argue with them until they hang up in frustration. Or you can get to the root of the misunderstanding (unclear fees? they forgot about taxes?) and then possibly choose to offer a refund as a thanks to them for helping you prevent other customers from becoming equally unhappy.
The key is treating all customers, even the crazy & abusive ones, with respect and knowing when to cut bait. Staying above the fray and not letting it affect your tone when you respond can be really hard some days, 'cause we're all human, but it's worth it.
The idea behind that point was more to push the team to get things right and go that extra mile to help the customer. If they're rude though then the rule doesn't apply.
Some customers will use vast amounts of your time and constantly expect you to accommodate them. Especially in a small operation, the customers that cause disproportionate expense are toxic. These are the ones that you need to actively fire, and the assumption that every customer is a good customer (or that every customer is right) quite simply precludes this option.
Don't be too technical. Gauge the technical ability of who you're talking with and match it.
I can't tell you how many times I've called customer support with a problem that I've done all my homework for the support call and then get greeted by a person who absolutely must follow a script.
You could tell them you restarted the server, restarted the process, etc., etc. but they don't care - they just force the script on you. I get that the first line of support needs to triage the caller before escalation, but annoying them right up front makes the experience very unpleasant.
One thing I would add - always strive to respond within 24 hours, but do NOT respond in seconds/minutes.
Five minutes after sending, users are often still frustrated and a good number won't read your response before firing back as their adrenaline is still up (also, they think you're a robot because you're too fast and robots can't possibly have the right answer!)--it'll take twice as many emails to solve the problem.
However, if they, say, can't find a button on an interface, telling them where the button is in 30 seconds or less will yield an immediate firing back: "I already tried that, that doesn't work!!" 60% of the time.
Waiting 15 minutes to even up to four hours to answer the email will yield "Awesome, that works, thanks and thanks for answering so quickly!" most of the time, in my testing.
In fact, each and every time I deal with a difficult customer, when I go back and look at the thread, der, I answered them in under 5 minutes. I like to answer fast, but I have very much found that it hurts rather than helps so very often.
Gotta wait for some of that frustration to dissipate so that they're calm and able to read and follow instructions again. Frustration does not aid reading comprehension - when you're frustrated, sometimes you don't even read the response before firing back! I myself have been pretty guilty of this as a customer.
I think it can be reworded to be useful guiding principle in more environments if you're willing to parse it more carefully. Perhaps something like "The customer's perception is more important than yours."?
I am sure there are some types of business that would rather take the customer-is-right approach, which may be easier and less costly. And there are also probably times when letting certain customers take their business elsewhere may actually be best.
If you listen to your customer you will have a better chance of solving the problem in the correct way.
Well, if I am a customer and I am asking for something stupid I'd rather have this pointed out politely and then let me make an informed decision. Indeed, some of the best examples I've had of customer service is where the salesperson politely pointed out that what I was wanting to buy might not be such a great idea after all.
I think it could be reworded and be more useful (see my comment further down).
"Every model is wrong, but some are useful"
While it's technically correct that the customer is not always right. It is useful to push this mindset on employees who directly interact with costumers. Leaving to your employees to figure the gray areas by themselves my cause you a larger net headache than telling them there's no exceptions, when it might not always be true.