Here are my tips for dealing with the most awkward moment you will have in customer service… the moment you realise you’ve made a mistake. So how do you deal with it?
Keep it in perspective: Don’t have a “sky is falling” panic for a “spilt milk” crisis. On the other hand, if the sky really is falling, don’t pretend that everything is OK. Things have a habit of escalating on their own if they’re not dealt with.
Keep your sense of humour: Everybody makes mistakes, and they’re a lot easier to deal with when you realise that. Don’t beat yourself up and don’t try to put anyone else down to make yourself feel better. Take a deep breath, smile, choose to see the funny side, then get to work on fixing the problem.
Own up: To yourself, to your client, to your colleagues, to your supervisor. Whoever is affected by the mistake should hear about it from you. Because even if you fix it almost immediately – there’s a good chance that everyone will hear about it from someone. If the someone isn’t you it will just seem like you tried to cover it up.
Fix it: As soon as possible! Do what needs to be done and definitely do everything that CAN be done. If it relates to a customer, particularly a dissatisfied customer, make sure you tell them exactly what you are going to do, step by step and give them a realistic time frame for it to be done. If you absolutely positively cannot fix it – then you will need to have something else to offer. Whether that be a refund, future discounts, free products or services or an apology it needs to be clearly communicated and followed up on.
Ask for help: If you can’t fix things yourself, ask your colleagues to help, ask management for help, ask the customer what else could you do that would solve their problem. Keeping problems to yourself will never help anyone.
Learn from it: Look at what went wrong, how it was resolved, what could have been done better and what was done that was great. Use the results to make changes so that the error is unlikely to reoccur and make decisions on how to act if the error does occur again.
Eat chocolate: Buy a nice big block of your favourite chocolate and give yourself a pat on the back.
So there you are, my tips for getting over that awkward moment. Do you have any others you’d like to share?
