Interacting with customers is something that even the most established and experienced businesses often struggle with. This is because relating to and connecting with a human being on a direct level requires entirely different skills to creating broad marketing campaigns or understanding customer trends. However, it’s something that is simply too important to ignore and can often have some incredibly far reaching consequences to your business as a whole. With that in mind, here are three things that you need to do every single time you interact with customers, especially customers with some kind of complaint.
Give them a chance to offer criticism
Hearing criticism can’t be hard, especially if it’s about your business. After all, your business is something that you may well have spent years building from the ground up so hearing someone say something disparaging about it can feel very personal. However, it’s important to remember that it’s not personal and you need to offer your customers somewhere to offer their criticism or complaints.If you look at these peninsula business services complaints, you’ll see that the majority are incredibly positive, but there are still some criticisms mixed in. By allowing customers to provide that negative feedback, the company is able to use it as a jumping off point to improve itself overall. If you just hide your head in the sand and ignore any complaints, then your business is never going to get the chance to grow or evolve in any meaningful way.
Never shift the blame
When a customer or client is upset or has some kind of problem, it can often be pretty tempting to try and shift the blame onto someone or something else. In fact, it may well be the case that it’s not anyone’s fault but is just down to computer error or even chance. However, when you say that to a customer, all they hear is that you don’t want to listen to their problem at all. Rather than your first instinct being to deny any wrongdoing, acknowledge your customer’s problem as being genuine and take responsibility for it. After all, it doesn’t matter what the cause was, your customer still ended up in the same position. That way you can shift the focus onto what you’re going to do to help your customer, rather than trying to shift the blame somewhere else.
Be totally transparent
Then again, there’s a chance that the problem is because of something you did, or something that someone else in the business did. If that’s the case, then you should be honest about it with your customers. If you’re constantly trying to tell your customers that everything is fine, even when something is clearly going wrong, they’re going to lose a lot of faith in you and your business. However, by putting your hands up and letting your customers know exactly what happened, as well as exactly what you’re doing to fix it, you’re going to be able to connect with them much more effectively than you would if you spent all of your energy trying to keep them in the dark.
