What To Do When You Are On The Receiving End Of Poor Customer Service

Everyone has a level of expectation when they enter into a scenario when they’re likely to receive customer service, but what do people do when the standards do not reach their expectations? There are things that can be done, but whether they make an impact is something else altogether. This article looks at what can be done, and what will be most beneficial for your individual circumstance in order to start receiving the service you desire.

Firstly, the gravity of the situation has to be evaluated. How much did the customer advisor offend you? Did they just displease you? Were they rude or just neutral towards you? There is a key difference between the advisor having the capacity to be friendlier and them choosing not to, and them actually being rude to customers. If it is the former, the benefit of putting the time and energy into complaining will probably be too small to be worth measuring even, therefore the course of action should most likely be to simply pass the word around those who you know and don’t recommend the establishment.

There are the more severe methods however if you feel it is necessary to take the issue further. One of these includes contacting the head office of the company in order to pass on details of your experience. This can assist the company in developing their customer service training and maintenance; if they are unaware of a problem they will be unable to change it.

One thing that should always be taken into account as well is your motivation for contacting the company. In most cases complaints about customer service is, and should be, philanthropic – for the benefit of others. Yes, often there is some form of compensation included in the response from the company but this should not be something that the customer plans for, it should be for the good of the service the company offers.

In this day and age it is incredibly easy to contact a company – writing a letter and waiting a week or so for a response is no longer the only port of call. However, there is one particular way that can get the message out in the public spotlight as well as under the noses of those who matter, and that’s social media. The equivalent of peer pressure has led to the majority of companies having a presence on social media and therefore they can be contacted directly, and it is in full view of the public. If companies are interested in keeping a positive reputation then they need to know how to respond to such complaints and situations, and in turn handle it within the company.

For more information on customer services as well as examples of how to conduct customer care, contact Customer Services Contact or the New Look customer services.

Making Sure Your Company Can Absorb ‘Waste’ Customers

No company can operate assuming that every customer they encounter is going to equate to them making a sale. Some of them are just looking to establish the process or cost or both of the product they are interested in, others are just going to be looking for the sake of it. Either way, your company has to be prepared to cushion the blow of these customers.
This is most often done by simply slightly increasing the retail of the company’s products which should create enough of a margin that the company can then offer small, free samples. There are times however when this ‘wastage’ – for want of a better word – is not through the products that the company sells, but through their customer service.

This is not because employees waste their time on customers who are never going to bring them income, all customer have to be approached in the same way, but more through those customers who perhaps do not have an active social life and therefore use situations such as this for conversations. As patronising as this has the potential to sound, it is a fact of business that there are some people who demand this sort of attention and the company must be willing and able to absorb this.

Equipping your employees with the correct tools to handle customers such as this is the most important factor of this. There is a fine balance that must be established in order to keep the customer happy and fulfil their need for human interaction, while also allowing for your business to remain afloat.

Most often, this sort of customer can be found in coffee shops or similar. This is simply due to the length of time that customers are able to spend in the store – the whole point of the business is to keep customers busy in the shop, to make more purchases, but customers cannot be favoured. The object of customer service is to offer a standard level to all customers, if the employee favours a regular or one who simply behaves in a way that puts forces the employee to offer a higher level of service they run the risk of rejecting another customer. Which of course could and probably would lead to a loss of sale in one dimension or another.

Whether a customer is a drain on your company or not has to be evaluated over time but those people can be easily managed through confident and consistent customer service.

Contact one of the following should you wish to learn more about customer service: http://www.customerservicescontact.co.uk/sky-helpline/ or http://www.customerservicescontact.co.uk/vodafone-helpline/

Keeping Customers Happy While Waiting

Waiting is an intrinsic part of participating in customer service, particularly on the customers’ side of the relationship but there are ways to limit the irritation that is felt when the customer is left waiting. This article looks at a few things the company can do in order to keep the customer in the best frame of mind while they are waiting for to speak with a member of the customer services team.

It is a common fact of customer service call centres that the customer is left waiting listening to music – not always music that is to everyone’s taste, but music nonetheless – and this is one of the tools used in the industry for keeping customers calm. As an example, calling a car insurance company will give you several options one of which is to speak with the claims department. When you are reporting an incident with your car the chances are you are already a little stressed so waiting on hold listening to music is the last thing you want to do, but you will probably have to.

If the company plays calming music the customer has no option but to listen because they are waiting to be connected and therefore the music will calm their mood – even if they are resistant to the idea!

This is a solution for companies who deal over the phone, for those who have customers waiting in a store they need to be a little more innovative with their waiting tactics. Queuing is a tedious but necessary part of visiting a store, any store, but when customers visit a store in order to receive assistance with something they have purchased, received or are interested in, they do not expect to be left waiting. If they are waiting, it would be beneficial to the company to offer the customer something as a distraction.

It could be anything – perhaps a series of adverts that are in the waiting area ask questions or provoke thought. It is a natural for people to read, perhaps not extensively but writing has the power to infiltrate the customers’ brain without being obvious and even if the only thing the writing achieves is to distract the customer; that is mission accomplished. Thinking takes up a surprising amount of time and will buy the company that time with minimal expenditure.

Other tips for keeping customers distracted from waiting includes providing generic reading material such as magazines or leaflets that refer to the company and their products and services.

You can find more customer services tips by speaking with one of the major companies. Use either the Wonga contact number or the Vodafone contact number to be connected with one of these companies, both are extremely experienced in this area and willing to assist.

How to Deal with Customers When you’re Not in Charge

If you work in an environment where you have lots of regular customers and therefore can build relationships with them then it may be that you become ‘preferred’ by these customers. Generally speaking this quality emanates from you and other customers in the establishment will see that you are liked which translates into being competent, friendly, willing to help and therefore good at your job and the person to speak to if they have an issue.

Therefore you may find yourself in the situation where a customer approaches you with an enquiry but you are not the most senior member of staff on duty and therefore you do not have the authority to assist the customer in the way they desire. The obvious thing to do is to simply explain this fact and pass the customer over to your superior and allow them to assist with the problem.

This can cause problems in more than one sense though. It can cause an atmosphere with your superior because although it may not necessarily be that you are more competent than they, but you are more appealing to customers than they are and therefore appear to be more competent. Additionally, if you have an unhappy customer who has approached you because they need an issue rectified but all you can do is pass them on to somebody else; you may find them even more upset than they were previously.

Obviously not the result you were looking for. So it all comes down to your attitude and using your tone of voice and demeanour as a whole to regulate the customer’s mind-set and ensure that their patience levels remain unaffected by the delay in having their enquiry dealt with.

Your attitude will also help with work colleagues; being competent will leave your superiors grateful to have you on their team. Being overly-competent, as in arrogant, can make lower morale and cause an almost endless and irreversible set of problems between you and your colleagues. However, while it is industry and role dependent, the key has to be keeping a level attitude and always striving to put the customer first. Then you are covered by this argument; not in terms of it being used as a shield but so that you have a solid reason behind out-performing your colleagues and putting the customers first can never be bad for business.

One company who strive to offer service such as this is Orange. Whether it is in the shop or over the phone, all Orange employees look to provide the best customer service possible. Contact their customer services department via the Lloyds TSB customer service. For more information on the skills required to work in customer services, read our Ezine page.

Interlinked Customer Services

So many companies these days offer more than one service, i.e. a mobile phone provider will also supply landline and broadband services. This, in theory, makes the customers lives easier because they can have one standing direct debit leaving their account each month and receive all the services they require. However, this often means that said company’s customer service departments are also combined which may not give you the best quality of service possible.

Most often when you connect to these companies’ telephone lines you will be immediately connected to an automated menu that requests customers to select the option that is closest to your enquiry. This allows them to connect you to the correct department but there is some scepticism among customers about whether there are actually different departments or whether it is just a tactic for delaying customers while an assistant becomes available. This is not a cynical view; it’s a logical tactic – keeping the customer interacting with the phone, for a limited amount of time, prevents them from being on-hold for great lengths of time which aggravates customers.

Call centre staff are trained to deal with all sorts of enquiries and people and there is a stigma around call centres and how frustrating they are for customers so often before there has even been any communication between the company and the customer. The customer service assistants therefore need to be extremely calm people who can remain thus even when they are dealing with customers unwilling to listen or cooperate. This can only be worsened if the customer finds that they have been connected through to the wrong department which can happen when these major companies do not have separate departments with individually trained staff.

Also, the stigma around call centres often includes the customer service assistants not actually having any significant knowledge on any of the products and services offered by the company and simply attempting to answer all of your enquiries from a planned script. This means customers rarely get the answer they were looking for but do get a lot of superfluous information that is spurted at them by the customer service assistant as they endeavour to find the correct answer without admitting that they don’t know off the top of their heads.

For more information on customer services, their construction and the general movements of companies within the business market visit our News Feed that is updated regularly.

Customer Service Gone Mad

Customer services are a vital component to any company’s survival but has it reached a level of complete absurdity with the services they offer? With new shopping centres opening all the time, the UK’s shopping circuit is becoming more and more like America’s all the time but it seems that this is not necessarily a bad thing as this also means there are elements of their customer services dripping into our society and if America does anything well, it’s customer service.

Contemporary shopping centres or ‘malls’ if you are using American terminology are being built with more than just shopping in mind. It’s all about the whole experience and therefore they come with cinemas, food courts and crèches incorporated – the final element is brilliant for those with busy schedules who need to try clothes on or buy bulky items and therefore would be most useful to be child-free! There is a new service being incorporated though wherein the customer service assistants go above and beyond the usual call of duty.

Some things are purely common sense, things like gift cards for the shopping centre generally as opposed to specific shops, thus allowing customers options which is the crux of the reason for so many of these shopping centres sprouting up. They also offer many services that are necessary and useful – crèches, wheelchair hire and ‘fun’ pushchair hire to keep the kids entertained while you’re out looking for that perfect new interview outfit. However, the point of this article is to debate whether they also offer services for the sake of it. Do shoppers really need, or indeed want, the ability to browse the shops on a store-provided tablet? Or to drop their mobile phone off in a secure locker that allows you to charge the phone while you shop? Unlikely that these are needed. Admittedly it is frustrating when mobile phones lose their battery power and the owners are left with a feeling synonymous with that of losing a limb, but it is not a vital component to the experience.

As for the customer services department offering a collection of tablets that allow customers to browse the internet, including which shops have which offers available is surely a step too far. Isn’t the point of shopping in a shopping centre to navigate the businesses in some sort of order and find out what is available and where? Offering customers the ability to visit the customer services department and browse the shops virtually, defeats the object of building a shopping centre.

The other services generally provided are general visitor information including travel information – useful but surely if customers have managed to arrive at the destination they have a plan for getting home again – ‘shop and drop’ which allows customers to deposit their purchases and collect them later – granted very useful if you decide to visit the cinema or food court and finally free Wi-Fi, only necessary for those using their fingers as opposed to feet to shop.

The world has gone mad. Internet mad no less.

For more information on customer services or just the mad, mad world we live in have a look at our blog posts. Or, if you want to jump on the band wagon and have a tablet as well, contact Samsung and speak to their helpful and friendly customer services department.

Customer Service in Department Stores

Department stores have a different aura around them to normal shops. The format has outlasted everything else on the high street and they are synonymous with quality as well as quantity. In period dramas it is department stores that noble ladies and gentlemen enter when they require new outfits. The service that we know as being delivered in such establishments is of the absolute highest quality and is tailored to each individual. The question is: how much has this changed?
Go onto any high street in the UK and you will find at least two department stores all offering similar if not exactly the same range of products and all of them are busy. It always used to be that when customer entered a department store – particularly the high end ones – there would be a man at the door waiting to open it for you and greet you pleasantly. Then each department would be manned by customer service assistants willing to spend hours if necessary providing all the service you require to make the correct choice.

Contemporary society has brought about a demand for excessive choice, hundreds of options at the touch of a button and the ability to serve ourselves to ensure the most efficient service possible. Speed is everything in this society and sometimes that comes at the cost of good service. So, contemporary department stores and their service is also available online and the delivery of the items is then firmly in the hands of logistics companies and there is an option to pay more for quicker service.
The experience of shopping in a physical department store though is different, in theory more successful and certainly more of an experience. The various departments are still manned by employees but these departments are different now. Generally you’ll find: cosmetics, menswear, ladieswear, childrenswear, homeware and then a host of branded shops that can be found elsewhere on the high street within that shop. This means that while they are all populated by employees it is not done in quite the same way as it used to be; customers cannot drop anchor in one department and find everything they need. Also the payment system discourages any personal service as all items can be paid for at once or separately and most often in whichever department they reach last. The treatment that ensured personal service also demanded tailored bills that added to the experience.

In this sense, the service offered has changed drastically and there is now an emphasis on speed and total profits but it cannot be said that this is driven by customers or companies, it is by both. The high street has developed and is becoming ever-more estranged from the concept of providing a service because it is demanded.

Thank you for taking an interest in this article. We have many more articles on our homepage that discuss similar topics. There are many department stores in contemporary society and if you desire more information on any of the stores contact them directly. Click Here for all the contact details, including those for John Lewis.