By Jana Love
When handling a customer inquiry, it's our response that can often make or break a customer's experience or opinion of the experience. A delayed response, or no response, is also very dangerous when talking with a customer. Luckily, positively acknowledging the inquiry and stating an eagerness to assist is very simple. Most often, you can follow this formula, as shown above, to easily inform the customer that you understand and will assist, which is all they want to know.
Here is an example of how well this works. When a customer calls a hotel and asks to make a reservation, the agent can confidently reply by saying, “Yes, I’d be happy to help you with a room reservation in December. To do so, first, I have a few questions about your reservation details, and then we’ll discuss your preferences.” As you can see, if you follow the formula, you are just restating what the customer inquired about and preparing them for your questions. Why is it perfect….?
In the service industry, it is our job to meet the customer right where they are, in every way. From a customer perspective, having a service personnel that asks questions to ensure you understand, reads your body language, and simply cares about the outcome of the exchange you are having, is so impressive and rewarding.
The Corporate Executive Board conducted multiple surveys of more than 7,000 consumers, and one of their key findings from their research was what consumers want from marketers is simply simplicity. Consumer loyalty comes from many aspects and growing quickly is the ease of understanding information they can trust. It is our responsibility to ensure that our customers find it easy, enjoyable, and understandable when conducting business with us and positive responses do just that. So test your organization, how easy do you make it for your customers? Need help keeping it simple?
