The most challenging things in customer service usually involve dealing with multiple communications. These can be competing priorities from several clients, multiple instances of simultaneous contact or not knowing which of half a dozen or so places to look for information that you need. Getting organised and staying organised is the best way to avoid hassles and handle almost any situation with ease.
To try to eliminate frustrations, here’s a few simple things you can do:
Multiple customer priorities
Dealing with competing priorities between your customers is likely to happen on a regular basis. After all, it’s always urgent to the person who needs it done. When you’re the one who needs to get everything done yesterday, it’s a whole different story.
There are a two approaches to handling competing priorities from your customers:
Firstly, you can try to do it all on time. If you don’t sleep, and you don’t take breaks, and you work really really hard, you might just manage it. However you’re not likely to do a great job. There’s a much higher chance of errors creeping in. And tomorrow when the next round of customers in crisis occur, you’re not going to have anything in reserve to help them.
Alternatively, you can try to manage the priorities to allow you sufficient time to work on everything properly.
- The easiest way to do this, is to contact your clients and see which jobs are REALLY urgent. Often, you’ll find that if you tell a client you really can’t get it done until next week, they’re totally OK with that. So when overwhelm is imminent, try to negotiate a new deadline with your clients.
- You need to prioritise which you work on. It’s up to you how you decide which jobs are the priority. I usually work on a first in, best dressed basis and only bump someone to the front of the queue if they’ve got a genuine unavoidable crisis. I try to tell myself that:
Lack of organization on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part
While compassion for an error is great, the more regular crisis sufferers can be draining. After a while you get to know who has regular crises and can pretty much plan them into your diary. - You might want to look at either outsourcing some of the work, or hiring additional staff if you’re often overwhelmed by priorities
- As a last resort, if you have too many customers to be able to service them properly, and you don’t want to grow the size of your business, you might want to let some of your less ideal clients go. After all, while they may not be your ideal client, they probably are someone else’s ideal client.
Dealing with multiple instances of contact happening at the same time
This can be a problem in a couple of ways. For example, if you’re in retail, then it’s likely you might have walk in customers, phone calls, email and social media queries all coming in at the same time. It can be very frustrating and hard to decide who to help first, or even worse, you can try to help everyone at the same time which will only end up with disgruntled customers all round.
Here’s a few tips to keep your cool when you’re phones are ringing, there’s a queue at the counter and you’re email and social media notifications are going nuts:
- First come, first served. If you’re with a customer, whether it’s on the phone or in person, don’t put them on hold or wander off to answer a call. Finish dealing with one before handling the other.
- Acknowledge everyone. If you’re on the phone and someone comes in, smile, give them a nod, make eye contact, it doesn’t matter which you do, just acknowledge that they’ve come in and make them feel welcome.
- Turn notifications down. Turn the notifications for social media & email down or off. You can check them when you’re not busy. Even better, have a note on your profiles, and an auto responder on your emails giving an idea of how long it generally takes you to get back to someone. I.e.: we check this page as often as we can during the day, but on a busy day we may not be able to respond immediately. We will respond within 24 hours wherever possible. Then if you’re going to have an issue that takes longer than 24 hours to sort out, contact the client within 24 hours and let them know what the issue is, why it’s taking so long to respond and when they should expect a response.
- Remember being busy is a GOOD thing. It’s certainly much, much better than the alternative of having a heap of free time because customers are choosing not to use your services.
- Enjoy what you do. If you love people, you’ll love providing great customer service. If you’re starting to get a bit jaded, maybe it’s time for you to either have a break, or find someone to take over the customer service side of things for you.
Standardise & document process and procedure
After attitude problems, lack of organisation is probably the biggest challenge to the provision of excellent customer service. If you can’t find the information you require, or if you aren’t authorised to see all client relevant information then you can’t possibly answer client enquiries effectively.
What sort of places:
- Customer contacts and communications – CRM System (Think Capsule, Zoho, Highrise)
- Accounts data – Accounting package or even something simple like a spreadsheet (for micro businesses)
- Stock information – Inventory Management System or again, spreadsheet for micro businesses
Finding things
All staff should be able to quickly and easily answer basic questions. Training is important to allow staff to be confident when answering questions. And to know who to pass more complicated questions on to. In addition to training, it’s helpful to have documented locations for information. Preferably in a “If you have a question about X the answer is in Y” format. Keep it online and in print at customer facing stations (checkouts, reception, telephones etc.). Also include a phone directory in the document so that complicated queries are easy to pass to the right person.
If you’d like some more ideas, check out my previous customer service posts
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