Customer recovery. Nobody in business wants to hear those words, though everybody needs to have those tools in their personal skill set belt. By acting quickly and being confident in your decisions, you can turn a customer nightmare into a customer dream come true. Here are seven vital steps in the process of customer recovery.
Listening is Vital
At a call center, it’s vital that you listen to what the customer is saying. They perceive that there’s a problem with your service and it’s up to you to piece together what the problem is and resolve it. Sometimes, clients will be so stressed that they’re not focusing on solutions, they’re focusing on making sure that you understand.
Put Yourself in the Customer’s Shoes
Empathy is a key trait for any call center worker. The ability to look at where a customer is coming from and see why they are upset helps to shape the solution for the problem. With that empathy, the customer is able to see that there is a human side to the company.
Take Responsibility for Your Actions
When a situation occurs, it’s necessary to take responsibility for your actions. You personally might not have made a mistake, but the customer is talking with you, so you are now the face of the company. There is nothing which will serve to infuriate your customers more than to say that it’s not your responsibility.
Apologize
It’s difficult, but apologizing means that you need to admit that something went wrong in the first place. Don’t offer excuses through the course of the interaction, apologize for the fact that it did happen and see how the issue can be resolved. Anything less is short-changing your customer.
Find a solution together
If the solution to the problem is not immediately forthcoming, talk with the customer to discover a solution together. What can you, as the representative of the company, do to make it right? Sometimes, the solution that the customer arrives at is much more lenient than the internal one that you came up with. By using callcenter recording software, you’ll be able to help others within the organization arrive at similar great solutions.
Follow through
This is one of the most important steps in the process. Make sure that you’re able to follow through on whatever customer recovery measure that you’ve decided on, then follow through. Your customers will appreciate your honesty and commitment to their satisfaction.
Validation and feedback
Make sure that the solution that you came up with together is the right solution for them. They need to feel that the problem has been taken care of, and that you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Your goal is to get complete satisfaction, and you should stop at nothing less.
While you might not want to be known for your customer recovery skills, they are still useful tools to have in your personal skillset. By establishing a procedure beforehand, you’ll be able to display confidence to your irate customers and quickly calm them down. The sooner you calm them down, the better chance you have of turning them into brand advocates.
CJ Silva is VP of Operations at KOVA Corporation.
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