The Joy of Sales: HOW TO WIN WITH DOOR-TO-DOOR MARKETING by John Caffrey

Author:John Caffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: eBookPartnership.com
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dealing with ‘Mishandled Customers’

The majority of customer complaints will relate to the merits (or otherwise) of the product or service you are offerring. Where these shortcomings are no worse than those of competing products or services, it makes sense to seek to retain the sale; where they are appreciably worse, it’s better to concede that you have lost this customer, and courteously withdraw from any further business with that customer, which will potentially evolve into a ‘saga’ – costly in both time and morale to you and your colleagues.

The more serious species of customer complaint however relates to wanton discourtesy by fellow staff who may have not only let down the customer in the manner or quality of service provided, but who may also have been verbally rude or unprofessional to that person. Although sometimes you may not be getting the full story from the customer (it’s true sometimes that it ‘takes two to tango’!) you should never query the customer’s version of events; by the same token however, you should never admit prematurely that it is correct.

If you are a supervisor or the owner of the business, you should offer to ‘follow up the matter urgently’ – steal the customer’s thunder by saying that ‘if that happened to me I’d be furious’ (this, being a purely hypothetical statement does not amount to validating the customer’s account of events, and thus does not involve you in any legal or other liabilities) and above all, where the customer is visibly irate, let them sleep on it – i.e. offer to revert to them no sooner than 24 hours later; if you get back to them the same day they will generally still be irate and not very docile from a problem resolution perspective. If they’ve had a night’s sleep they will be noticeably calmer and more easy to reason with the next day.

If on the other hand you’re just one of the ‘peons’ in your organisation – carry out your listening brief just the same and soften the force of customer resentment not just for yourself but for whoever else among your colleagues is going to have to deal with it. Offer to have a supervisor or manager make a personal call to that customer within 24 hours (but not sooner) and gather as much information about what happened as possible (taking written notes) and escalate the matter to your immediate superior – or if there are a number of people you could escalate it to, choose someone you know is going to follow up the issue competently, and not turn a drama into a crisis! Important elements of information to gather in advance of speaking with a ‘supe’ or a manager are:

Name, address and telephone contact details of complainant

Nature of product or service that they originally contracted to buy, if any.

Date, time and location where the incident of ‘customer mishandling’ took place

Precise details (in quotation marks) of what was said to them by your colleague, and what the customer also may have said.

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