“Dealing with Difficult Customers: How to Turn Demanding, Dissatisfied, and Disagreeable Clients into Your Best Customers” by Noah Fleming and Shawn Veltman (Career Press, $15.99).Did you promise what you delivered? If the customer doesn’t believe you did, there’s an expectations gap. The authors believe that any company can close that gap by being proactive — […]
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“Dealing with Difficult Customers: How to Turn Demanding, Dissatisfied, and Disagreeable Clients into Your Best Customers” by Noah Fleming and Shawn Veltman (Career Press, $15.99).
Did you promise what you delivered? If the customer doesn't believe you did, there's an expectations gap. The authors believe that any company can close that gap by being proactive — deal with the causes of complaints before they infest the customer base.
Here's their four-step proactive process: 1. Defining “Your hierarchy of (customer) horrors.” Identify the things you do or don't do that creates a customer complaint. To create your list, track and categorize the type of complaints made. To do this, you will have to ask employees to keep track of customers' reasons and really listen to all of those “this call may be monitored for quality purposes” recordings. Categorize them by looking at their root cause(s) — which includes “internal screw-ups.” If you have multiple locations, you'll need to track each separately.
2. Measure for frequency of “horror” occurrence; the authors suggest a 30-day minimum. Then prioritize the list. While it's easy to prioritize based solely upon frequency, consider cross-prioritizing horrors that will cost the company the most money and time to fix, easy fixes, and those that create real headaches for the customers.
3. Create the solutions list. This isn't an easy process because most problems involve more than one area of the company. Difference in occurrences between locations can also be valuable in pinpointing the source(s) of problems and their solutions. Look to the areas involved for input about alternatives. Seek input from customers complaining about specific issues, too, because they'll recognize that you're listening.
4. Solution implementation. Don't address all the horrors at the same time because trying to do too much at once can destabilize many organizational processes, which will only create more customer-centric problems. Instead, tackle your priorities by their rank and measure resolution by declines in occurrences.
