When handling customer complaints, you may overstep your boundaries in one of two main ways – by setting unrealistic expectations or by making inappropriate criticisms.
COMPLAINTS – OVERSTEPPING BOUNDARIES
hen handling customer complaints, you may overstep your boundaries in one of two main ways – by setting unrealistic expectations or by making inappropriate criticisms.
Discovering ways to avoid and overcome mistakes.
SETTING UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS
Making promises you can't keep to customers will only make matters worse. Even customers who aren't initially angry will be upset when you fail to deliver on what you've led them to expect.
To avoid this, first let customers know you understand the importance of the issues they're reporting and you'll do your best to help. Then make it clear what's possible. Try to negotiate a solution that benefits both the customer and your company, while being careful to offer only reasonable and realistic solutions.
MAKING INAPPROPRIATE CRITICISMS
Customers may be critical of your company, colleagues, or products or services. It's important you don't verify their criticisms or add similar comments of your own. This is inappropriate and unprofessional.
What you can do is apologize for shortcomings when appropriate and acknowledge a customer's frustration. You should make a point of finding out what happened and let the customer know you're going to do this.
You should also focus on possible solutions rather than on the problem itself or on how the problem occurred.
Lucy is a customer service representative for a software development company. Although she knows the company's products, she's not equipped to troubleshoot software problems. Follow along as she handles a call from Darren, a disgruntled customer.
DARREN: At last! Do you know I've been kept on hold for the past 20 minutes?
Darren is angry.
LUCY: I'm so sorry about that. That's just bad service. Now that you've finally reached me, what can I do for you?
Lucy is calm and speaks warmly.
DARREN: I've just installed the updated version of the accounting software from your company and now I can't access our inventory categories.
Darren seems calmer.
LUCY: OK. I'm going to do my best to help. I'm sure we can sort this out quickly and easily.
Lucy sounds anxious.
DARREN: Great. Thanks!
Darren is smiling.
REFLECT
Think about Lucy's responses in terms of setting up expectations and apologizing for mistakes.
What did Lucy do right and what did she do wrong?
HOW THE CALL WENT
Lucy apologized to Darren for the fact he had been kept on hold for so long, which was an appropriate response. However, when she went on to criticize the service her company is providing, she overstepped her boundaries and acted unprofessionally.
Lucy promised to do her best and focused on assuring Darren she'd help find a solution to his problem. However, she was wrong to lead Darren to expect an easy, quick solution when in fact she doesn't know for sure this will be the case. Setting up potentially unrealistic expectations like this may lead to further frustration and anger on Darren's part, especially if resolving the problem is more complex.
I have been teaching and training agents, team leaders, supervisors, managers and admins of call centers and other businesses in BPO related fields. This series, comes as a result of that experience. I have more than 4,000 modules that I plan on sharing here. This is # 002-04
