Our employees are the main contributors to the quality of the customers’ experience. Due to different reasons, our employees may be creating bad experience for the customers. Any such bad experience may lead to lost sales and lost customers. Here are some possible ways our people may be annoying our customers and what we should do about them:
Behavior
• How do our employees speak to the customers or how do they behave with the customers? Our receptionist, security persons, sales representatives, delivery boys, demo persons, drivers, peons, support executives, telemarketing executives or anybody who interacts with the customers personally or on phone affect our customers’ experience.
• Their behavior, tone and style of speaking, volume, language etc. either make the customer happy or annoy them. If they treat the customer badly, if they talk or behave rudely with them, if they are not sensitive, patient or cooperative, the customer will not like working with our company.
• We should train all such employees so that they are polite and respectful to the customers. Many times, this is related to the employee’s attitude. If efforts to modify the behavior do not succeed, people with bad attitude must be removed from customer facing roles.
• Also, to avoid such problems in future, care should be taken while hiring people for such customer facing positions. At every customer interaction point, hire only those people who have the right attitude and who are people friendly.
• Regularly monitor their behavior with the customers. (That’s why some companies record phone conversations of employees interacting with the customers.)
Poor Knowledge
• Sometimes, our employees are not fully aware about some of our products or services. When a customer asks for some information or wants some help, they are not able to help due to lack of information or knowledge. Or, they may provide misinformation, which may annoy the customer further.
• On other occasions, if the employees don’t know the internal processes, they may unknowingly mislead the customer. E.g. we sell some consumer durable goods and the prospect wants to know how soon and in what manner her on-site service request will be processed. If the employee does not know the entire process and bluffs about it or over promises, it may backfire later.
• Our entire customer-facing team must be trained very thoroughly and regularly about all products or services and all our processes which matter to the customers or affect them.
Being Greedy Without Adding Value
• At some hotels, restaurants or banquet halls parking attendants or security staff meaningfully salute the customers when they are leaving, in expectation of some tips.
• Employees of some regular service firms (couriers, newspapers, laundry, milk, grocery etc.) ask for tips and favors from the customers.
• At some salons or parlors the attendants expect some tips from the patrons. All customers may not be willing to give such tips. Moreover, there is no standard formula or method of calculating and giving such tips. This puts a customer in very awkward situation.
• All these are distasteful because the employees in question are just performing their duties and are adding no apparent exceptional value.
• Sometimes, the business leaders are simply not aware that such undesirable practices are going on.
• We should regularly seek the customer feedback and find out if our employees indulge in any such greedy and disagreeable practices with the customers or are putting the customers in awkward situation.
• Stop such annoying things immediately and firmly by putting the right controls, checks and policies in place.
(Expert advice to GROW your business wherever you are, whenever you want.
SMEBusinessGuide.com… https://goo.gl/E3pfoQ)
WHAT YOU CAN READ NEXT
NEXT POST:
Our Processes Affect Customers’ Experiences
PREVIOUS POST:
Customer Experience Needs Managing
