Difficult customers - there's no such thing Written by Alan Fairweather
A couple of years ago I had a call from a Customer Service Manager working in paper industry. He wanted me to run a seminar for his team, on "How to Deal with Difficult Customers".I had several telephone conversations with this manager organising dates, times and getting to understand his business. If I was to describe his style on telephone I would use words like, businesslike, cold, curt and somewhat impatient. I started to realise that if I was one of his customers then I might have been a bit "difficult". He certainly knew his business and I don't think he was a bad person but warm and friendly - forget it. There are actually very few genuinely difficult customers in world. And I hear you say - "we've got all of them". However majority of customers in world are reasonable people. They may not think way, look way, sound way that you do. However they are your customers and if you want their business then you've got to deal with them. They may get "difficult" from time to time if they feel they've been let down. It's how you handle them that'll determine if they continue to be a problem or if you can turn them around. Difficult customers and situations usually occur because some part of our core service has failed or customer perceives it to have failed. We've not delivered on time, customer has wrong product, it doesn't work or it's not what customer expected. What happens then is, customer comes to interaction with us in a negative frame of mind. It's what happens then that'll decide whether they deal with us again or bad mouth us to other people. The trick is not just to concentrate on fixing core service issues. Telling customer that you'll replace product, deliver it in half an hour or
| | Hold onto what you've gotWritten by Alan Fairweather
You probably spend a great deal of your time looking for new customers or clients. However, are you sure your doing enough to hold onto ones you've got. One of least costly ways to grow your business is to get customers to come back and buy more of your product or service.How many customers have you lost this month? I'm sure it's not something you want to think about too much, however it's inevitable that you'll lose customers and clients for a whole range of reasons many of which are out with your control. I read a survey some years ago that suggested customers leave a business for four basic reasons: 14% leave because they're dissatisfied with quality of product or service, 9% leave because of price, 5% leave for other reasons and a whacking great 72% leave because of "supplier indifference". Too many suppliers give customers impression that they don't care about repeat business. I've stayed in hotels, dealt with banks and building societies and dealt with suppliers who didn't seem to care whether I came back or not. We need to continually let our customers know we care about them. We need to keep in touch, write to them, send them
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