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.