|
Best Practices in Customer Service Part Four. Customer Service on the Front Line
If you want specific ideas you can use immediately, this is the article. The author offers a tool for assessing customer service skills, six ways to retain your customers, top 10 mistakes employees make with customers and how to prevent them, 14 tips for calming upset customers, six common questions about customer relationships, and four ways to rebound from customer annoyances. Rebecca L. Morgan, CSP, is Managing Partner of Morgan Seminar Group in San Jose, California. She works with organizations that want their people to work smarter and with people who want to get more done. Rebecca has written four books—TurboTime: Maximizing Your Results Through Technology (Morgan Seminar Group, 1996), Professional Selling: Practical Secrets for Successful Sales (Crisp Publications, 1988), Making Time For Excellence, and Calming Upset Customers (Crisp Publications, 1989 and 1996). She has also produced six audio cassette programs and has been featured on Nightingale-Conant's audio sales magazine, "Sound Selling." E-mail: RLMorgan@aol.com Web site: http://www.rebeccamorgan.com/ Every industry faces peak-volume periods—times when employees tend to get overworked and stressed out, when customers may become upset and turn elsewhere. How well do you handle your periods of peak demand? How would your customers and employees answer that question? This article offers 13 strategies to help you better manage to make the most of your peak challenges. Janelle M. Barlow, Ph.D., is President of TMI, USA, a partner with the Danish-based multinational training and consulting group. She's the author with Claus Moller of A Complaint Is a Gift: Using Customer Feedback as a Strategic Tool (Berrett-Koehler, 1996). She's also a speaker and seminar leader who has personally experienced the frustrations of managing a company that experiences a high-volume period five months in length! (TMI sells its popular Time Manager product, and thousands of customers order calendar products at year's end.) E-mail: JaBarlow@aol.com Web site: http://www.tmius.com/ Dianna Maul manages TMI's Pacific Northwest office. Dee Dee brings years of experience in customer service and call centers while working for Nordstrom, Horizon Airlines, and AT&T Wireless Call Center. She was one of the founding directors of Horizon Airlines, where she conceptualized the Horizon Air Training Academy. She honed her ability to handle peak demands while raising five children, including a set of triplets. E-mail: DiannaMaul@aol.com The telephone is a necessity and a convenience for almost any business. But it can also be a handicap. In most communications, we benefit from facial expressions, gestures, and other body language. But, as the author notes, because we're so accustomed to using phones, it's easy to forget how fundamentally handicapped we are on the phone, particularly when dealing with complex and/or stressful matters, such as customer service issues. Here are some ways you can help your customer service personnel compensate. Kathleen Brown is Senior Training Consultant with Mandel Communications in Soquel, California. For the past 10 years, she has trained thousands of people in communicating more effectively and providing the best in customer service. She's worked with corporations such as Bank of America, Xerox, National Semiconductor, Nikon, and AirTouch Cellular. E-mail: edm@mandelcom.com Web site: http://www.mandelcom.com/ The people who handle your telephones are ambassadors for your company, providing information and generating good will. Are they making the best impression and maximizing on opportunities? That largely depends on the managers who train, monitor, and coach them so they can properly represent your company. This article pro-vides guidance for managers who care about their ambassadors—and about making a good impression for the company. Donna Hall earned a degree in medical technology from Trinity College in Washington, D.C. She began her career working in the Children's National Hospital Medical Center, where she first began her career in customer service. Working very closely with the emergency room staff and patients, she realized she had an ability for calming and diffusing feelings in chaotic and stressful situations. After working for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, Donna joined USA Today as it was being launched as a recruitment customer service/sales representative, where she later created a department to handle all outbound serve communications. In 1993, she started her own company, The Right Answer, Inc. E-mail: donnahall@therightanswer.com Web site: http://www.therightanswer.com Automated Response Systems have been a blessing and a curse for businesses. There are considerable advantages—but not if customers react negatively, finding them difficult to use or just preferring a human contact. This article explains how to make the most of technology, based on research findings, and how to better serve your customers. Marlene Yanovsky is Vice President of Technical Assistance Research Programs (TARP), an Arlington, Virginia-based research and consulting firm specializing in customer service management and measurement. Marlene has helped clients across a wide range of industries evaluate and improve their service processes, assessing and implementing 800 numbers for customer response, telemarketing and teleservicing call centers, and measuring and tracking customer satisfaction. E-mail: myanovsky@tarp.com Web site: http://www.tarp.com Return to Best Practices in Customer Service page |