My experience with customer service has been surprisingly…pleasant. 😅
When I was doing research while working on opening my store, I constantly ran into nightmare stories about customers going bonkers, or giving poor ratings and reviews. I did everything to try and avoid them.
While approaching 300 sales, I can attest and confirm that problems WILL occur. It must be a miracle to not run into strange situations that adversely affect your customers.
But something odd seems to happen every time.
My customers are surprisingly chill about problems.
I mean, they WILL contact you. But I find that this formula seems to work magic.
- DON’T MAKE STUFF UP. Just be upfront. People can see right through the ad-lib routines.
- SAYING I DON’T KNOW IS ONLY COOL if you provide a PLAN to correct It. You are supposed to be the expert of your entity, “I don’t know” isn’t a solution. People want to know that you can solve their issue. If you don’t know, you don’t know… but get to fixing it!
- GET BACK RIGHT AWAY. You saw their email, you saw their message. They know your phone isn’t far away from you. Don’t pretend to be “too busy”. People over-use this excuse. If you are working a day job, or have visitors, just a simple “Please let me get back to you ASAP” works wonders. Let me look into it works too, unless you abuse it and take too long.
- Don’t dismiss their concern. To you, their order being a day late isn’t a big deal. To them, their dying father might not get to see it. Get it? Always be empathetic, you NEVER know why they are concerned. And they usually have a valid concern.
- Offer SOMETHING if you screwed up. We make mistakes. Fix them by offering SOMETHING. Even if they don’t want the coupon code, or free sticker, they won’t go write a scathing review which is even more hurtful for you.
- STOP BLAMING OTHERS! Your customer could not possibly care what the post office is doing. They didn’t order from the post office, they ordered from YOU. They ordered from YOUR website. YOU own it! The post office is 20 days late? (Yes, this happens.) Great, send them another product to replace it. Then fight the post office later, don’t fight your customer.
That’s all for now! Let me know in the comments how you feel about this.
-KG
