I learned early on to say my “please” and “thank-you” in order to avoid any minor injuries. Mom had a long reach, and while I was good at ducking, I preferred to do as told then risk a stinging slap. Being polite became so ingrained with who I was; I was even referred to as “polite” in my high school yearbook description. Now THAT’S polite when teenagers point it out.

Which brings me to today’s post, which also happens to be the final post for the 25 Things You Should Do In Customer Service. And that is to be sure to always thank your customers.

In customer service, I notice more often than not, customer service representatives are losing their manners. I’ve been on the phone or in a store on more than one occasion where the representative seemed to barely register a pulse. And while they may not have been rude to me, they surely were not going out of their way to be friendly.

To me, it’s just logical to say thank you to your customers. If they are shopping for your products, and hopefully buying them, you want to thank them for all their worth. Because their worth a lot to you at that point!

Even if the customer isn’t buying from you at that moment, you still want to say thank you. You’re thanking them for coming to visit your store or site. You’re thanking them for the consideration of purchasing your services. And you’re thanking them for hopefully coming again in the future.

You may not think customers notice these simple, small gestures of appreciation, but they do. If a customer comes often enough, they notice consistency of friendliness, manners, appreciation, and attention given to them. I have more than once been in a location I noticed these things and made a point to mention what friendly/polite service they had. It’s also why I would go back.

So from now on, do what your momma told you and be polite. Not just to your customers, but to everyone! And if your momma never told you that, then pretend I’m your momma – Don’t forget to say Thank You!

As a customer service rep for any business, if you tell someone you’re going to follow up with them, then you do it. There are no excuses for not. In fact, there are a few situations you should always be following up with the customer:

• You’ve told a customer you will get back to them with information they’ve requested
• A customer has a scheduled service
• At the end of any service visit made by your company

Not only is it common courtesy to follow up with someone you already told you would call, but most of the time, that person is waiting for you to provide information that is important to them. And often that information is costing or saving them time and money.

If a customer has a scheduled service, a quick reminder call to your customers is a nice way of showing your business is considerate of their time. It also ensures there won’t be any problems with a tech going out to the location and no one being there.

Often, when a service trip is over, many businesses feel that is where their contact with the customer ends. This is a big mistake, because essentially, they’re making the assumption that everything went fine with the service call, or that the customer has no questions. And we all know what it means to assume.

When I was an Account Coordinator, it was part of my responsibility to contact the customer within 48 hours from the end of the service visit. And while most of the time, everything with the service went very well, there were a number of times there were problems. Either the customer wasn’t happy with the service itself, or they actually had to have a tech come back out to the location. Sometimes, they had questions about the service, but hadn’t had the opportunity to call in. Whatever the case, they ALL were appreciative that I had followed up with them.

Here are a few rules you should abide by for follow up:

• Always give a specific time or time frame you will contact the customer (within an hour, by end of business day, 5:00p.m., within 24 hours, etc.)
• Always call back within the time frame you gave the customer
• Follow up should always be within the first 24 hours if possible, and no more than 48 hours maximum. If follow up needs to be extended, give the best estimated time for follow up you can
• If you have to be delayed in contacting a customer back, always acknowledge and apologize for the delay
• Make sure you have the correct contact information to reach the customer – even if they’ve already given it to you

One of the things I often see is what is effectively a sales position wrapped up in the guise of “customer service representative”. They key to knowing this is truly a sales job is the descriptions commonly use phrases such as:

“go-getter”
“aggressive”
“self-starter”
“self-motivated”
“work for commission”
“ability to motivate customers”

You should never see any of those words in a customer service representative job description. All of these phrases are “action” oriented to get other people to do something. In a customer service position, you aren’t trying to get customers to “do” something, so much as your job is to “help” them with something. Or rather, the customer wants YOU to “do” something.

I don’t know if I’m seeing this more and more now because companies are trying to get around the “bad-word” of sales and gain more attraction to the job. Personally, I hate sales. I don’t like solicitation in general, and although I was told I would make a great salesperson, I never had any desire for the position.

But Sales is a necessary evil, and in business, it’s a good one. How else do you get people to buy your stuff? As the article points out, it isn’t all about customer service. I do agree with this. If you don’t have someone proactively reiterating the benefits of your company service or product, while you may still have sales, you won’t have them at the rate you want them to be. Sales in an active form can generate more bang for your buck and gain new customers you wouldn’t have if you’d remained passive.

And Sales is most effective when you combine it with great customer service, but it shouldn’t be just about customer service. As the article discusses, when you use customer service as your only sales tactic, you’re really only generating information, but not actively gaining assurance of a buy. As a salesperson, your job is to seal the deal and know when you walk away you just added a new customer and more money to the company’s bank. And when you have great customer service skills combined with selling tactics; that is a powerful tool right there.

However, it doesn’t work the other way around. Sales is not customer service. Customer service should be focused on assisting the customer where their problems, questions, concerns, and inquiries. Customer service is about information and communication. If I’m calling in to find out how I can get my vacuum cleaner fixed, I don’t want the rep on the phone trying to up-sell me to their latest and greatest product. If I wanted to buy something, I would have either said that directly, or simply gone to the store to purchase a new one.

Take a look at the article and see how this may apply to your company. Have your salespeople become more like customer service reps? Are you trying to use your customer service reps as salespeople, when they really should be just called Sales?

Not only is being placed on hold suddenly an annoying occurrence, but in my opinion, it’s downright rude.

Now I understand the need or desire of some companies wanting to make sure all calls are picked up as soon as the phone rings. The entire purpose of having a phone that takes multiple calls is so you can manage more than one person at a time and therefore “better serving your customers”. Not mention, the expectation of the customer is to get someone “live” to talk to. Nothing worse than having to constantly leave messages and wondering if you’ll ever be contacted back.

But there are ways to handle the “on hold” situation where you are still performing your duties without isolating the customer – or possibly ticking them off. It’s a simple matter of courtesy.

Instead of just saying “hold on a sec”, ASK the customer if it’s okay to place them on hold. This gives the customer:

• A more polite warning they will be placed on hold in advance
• Inclusiveness of the decision to hold
• A better feeling you still care about their needs

Simply asking them permission to hold will also lead the customer into typically saying yes. They may still be frustrated for being placed on hold, but they’ll have the better sense that you are still taking care of them.

There are also ways to alleviate a customer’s frustration from being placed on hold. This is by how you respond to them when coming back to their line. You immediately want to thank them for holding, and then APOLOGIZE they had to hold in the first place. You can even add a note of empathy by saying,

“I know it’s really frustrating to be placed on hold, but I’ve been waiting for that return call and couldn’t miss it. Thank you so much for your patience, it’s appreciated”.

Of course it doesn’t have to be that lengthy or complex, but you get the idea of what I mean. You’re reassuring the customer you’re not ignoring them and appreciate them for allowing the interruption without getting upset.

So what do you do when they DON’T want to be placed on hold? Of course you have that question. I would too.

In that situation, you have to evaluate the situation. Here are some questions to ask:

• How upset or irate is the customer?
• How important or urgent is it to answer the other call?
• Do you have voice mail?
• Are you going to lower your call volume performance by taking the call?
• Does that even really matter?

Most of the time, if you have voice mail – and in this day and age, I’d be surprised if you didn’t – if a customer tells you they don’t want to be placed on hold, it’s because they are upset or frustrated. You don’t want to upset them further by going against their wishes, so the best thing to do is let the call go to voice mail. It shouldn’t even matter if you have a performance measurement for taking calls. It’s not about the numbers; it’s about the customer’s experience at that point.

On the other hand, if you have caller id, or you are expecting a call back for an urgent or important matter, you can briefly explain to the customer the matter is urgent and assure them you are simply placing the other call on hold and you’ll come right back to them. By assuring them you’ll be right back –and follow through with this – you’ll gain the customers trust and appreciation while still being able to take care of the other matter without creating more problems.

I’ve been in the above situation before, and nine time out of ten, while the customer may not have wanted me to switch over, they usually let me. Not only that, they were usually surprised at how fast I was able to switch back to them and continue our conversation. If you’re good at it AND sincere in taking care of your customers, any conflicts you may have will always be forgiven.

She tried to make the arrangements online, but wasn’t sure if the credit would be switched over properly. Since there was no way to access her credit online, Karen went ahead and called AirTran’s customer service line.

When she spoke to the customer representative, she was informed that she would be charged $15 for their assistance. Apparently Air Tran charges a direct booking fee simply to have a live person assist you instead of doing it yourself.

Let me tell you, my jaw dropped to the floor when she told me about this. I can’t believe ANY company would charge money – let alone $15 dollars – to try to force you to do your booking online. I’m still stunned!

Maybe I’m clueless and more companies do this than I’m aware of; probably because I usually try to do everything online anyway and avoid talking to customer service reps whenever possible. But if this is standard practice, I’m appalled.

In my opinion, if you have a customer service representative that you’ve hired to assist customers, then this means you expect customers to have need of their help. There should be no extra charge to a customer if they aren’t capable of completing an online transaction without assistance. To me, it’s punishing the customer for their lack of knowledge – whatever it may be. And in my friend’s case, she was being punished for something that wasn’t her fault in the first place.

Let me ask you readers – is this common practice? Have you run across companies who force you to pay fees for using their “direct service” instead of doing it yourself online? Which companies were they and how did you handle it?

I thought that this might actually make a good topic for the day; not letting your personal life get in the way of providing good customer service. While being sick is a little different, it brings to mind that we all have a bad day from time to time – usually because something is going on in our personal life that causes stress.

I’ve been on the receiving end of what must have been pretty horrible days from some customer service representatives. And let me tell you, understanding they had a bad day did not at all convince me that I should be sympathetic to the fact that they acted disinterested, unhelpful, or were downright rude to me.

I don’t care what is going on in your personal life, if you can’t leave it at home when you start your day, you’re doing yourself and your customers a disservice. Your demeanor, or that of your employees, is a direct reflection of not only your customer service, but your entire store. If a customer walks away feeling they were treated poorly by an employee who decided to take their foul mood out on them, you can sure as heck can bet they’re not going to be coming back for more.

When I worked in customer service, I constantly had stress going on, both at work and at home. I’ve had major break-ups to deal with, death, accidents, heated arguments, and financial worries. You name it, I probably dealt with it. But not one customer would have ever known anything was wrong when speaking with me on the phone because I never – I repeat NEVER – let my personal baggage enter into the conversation. People used to be amazed how I could switch so easily to my “pleasant” voice, even if I’d just finished venting a thousand expletives over whatever crisis was on hand at the moment.

Some people are naturally adept at doing this. But it’s actually really not that difficult. It’s simply a matter of choosing to be pleasant. And really it shouldn’t even have to be a choice; it should be something you simply DO. If you decide that you just don’t give a darn and every customer is going to know you’re having a bad day, week, or month, then you probably don’t need to be in the customer service business in the first place.

So next time you’re having a bad day, try finding a way to get rid of some of that pent up stress before you start dealing with people for the day. Vent to someone you trust. Write a quick letter to yourself about what’s bothering you. Go outside to your car and scream for a minute with all the windows rolled up. (Although you might want to make sure no one else is around to see you!). Go someplace quiet for a 5 minute meditation. Whatever it takes to help you get through the rest of the day.

And when you face that next customer or speak to them on the phone, let them think you’re actually having the BEST day of your life. Who knows – maybe by the end of it you’ll even begin to think that yourself!