Your Customers Are Sayin

Customer Service Training, Corporate Certification

Home | About Us | Contact Us

Your Customers Are Saying it Loud and Clear

Each week, we take a quick moment to share a tip or insight into customer service. These Video Blog entries are candid and unscripted (as you will tell). Enjoy the information.

Video Blog Entry #2 - Your Customers Are Saying it Loud and Clear

Learn how we can help you easily, and very inexpensively, build your business "Through the Eyes of Your Clients".

This is a complete, unedited transcription of the video above:

The key to any customer service system or program is to better meet your client’s needs. And in regards to meeting your client’s needs, you have to find out exactly what those needs, wants and expectations are in order to meet them. So you need to gather feedback.

Traditionally, feedback has been thought of as customer service surveys, either telephone or online, paper and trying to gauge the customer’s level of satisfaction. However, we want to talk about one of the most common overlooked forms of feedback. There are many of them, but we’re going to address one of them here.

Every contact that you make with a customer is an opportunity to gather feedback. And your front line staff maybe passing up critical opportunities to gather that. Whenever you talk with a customer on the phone, through email, whatever methods you're doing it… they might be asking questions, they might be giving you a comment about a product or a service, or they might have a problem or complaint with an order. These moments are valuable, and you have to take advantage of them.

Let’s take an example of say… a specialty clothing store. It might be a lingerie store or maybe a swimsuit store, some place where they have special garments. The customers keep calling up finding out how to better maintain the clothing. This is the point of feedback. You can tighten up your operations in order to better educate your clients on how they could better take care of the products. You might solve this in one of two ways. It might be through putting in a little business size card that has directions to the website to find maintenance guides and obviously, when they're on your website, you're able to market there as well. Or maybe on that same card, it has the maintenance directions directly on there.

Take another example if someone calls up and says “hey, you know, I have a quick question. I looked for it on the website and couldn’t find it.” And your sales rep immediately responds, or your customer service representative says “hey, no problem, I’ll get you the information right away.” Well… there is a problem. And the problem is that you have an opportunity to tighten up your backend so the customer didn’t have to call in the first place. It’s a point of feedback.

What's the solution? Well, you have to train your staff – your frontline staff – to gather those moments of feedback and recognize them.

One of the ways you can do it is to simply have them watch this blog entry. It’s a quick easy way to educate them and open their eyes to every passing comment that the client makes may be an opportunity to better tighten up your backend operations, or to provide something you never thought of in the first place.

One of the things we use here at Entyro is a simple half page form that says Feedback in Passing. So any time that one of our staff talks to a client or a customer, and you just record it on the form. You might also have your frontline employees fill out a quick email with the passing comment. This just gets put into the inbox of a manager or it comes to my inbox, and every two weeks, we take them out and we review them.

The timeline can be set for your organization, but get a general collective system that your employees can put feedback into. So either take a half page form or have an email system where they put the subject line, Feedback in Passing, and it’s gotta be quick, it’s gotta be easy, or your employees won’t use it.

So that’s a quick little tip. Gather all the feedback that you possibly can. Every time you have contact with a client, if they have a passing comment, a question, it’s a chance to tighten up your operations. You just have to listen.

If you want more information about how you can better tighten up your backend systems and apply better customer service, visit us online at www.entyroservicegroup.com and download our free information package.

Until then, all the best on creating a higher, better level of service in your organization.