A question that customer support personnel ask themselves often is “can we ever satisfy a customer?” You know the saying “The customer is always right”? I have experienced firsthand, and you may also know, that when you give people that kind of leverage over you, it gives them power to mistreat you. But most customers don’t take advantage of you because they are rational, empathetic people.
There are quite a number of instances when impatient customers get physical with support personnel. 99.9% of the time you are forced to brainwash yourself into understanding the customers pain, even though you are being abused or harassed. The painful thing is that you hardly get a “thank you” when you finally sort the client out.
We in the Technology industry are quite lucky, as our customer support team rarely have to interact with clients face to face. However, for our colleagues in sales, the account managers and even service delivery who go to interact with these people, only God knows the kind of slander they face.
The real question is what magic does customer support perform to satisfy the customer and ensure value for service?
Katherine Barchetti said “Make a customer, not a sale”. Cultivating relationships is the gateway towards gaining a customer who would want to come back. Showing genuine interest to serve or empathy in fixing a customer’s problem is very essential.
What is important to a customer is what you can do for him or her. How can you solve my problem? What pain can you alleviate? What cost can you reduce?
Several business owners try to please customers when they are in the process of buying something. But a measure of how much you really value their patronage is dependent on the after sales/deal experience you provide, the same applies across all industries.
As a Networks and Enterprise solution provider, the experience is usually on-going and this means you must maintain a standard that enables the customer appreciate the value of your services. This implies that from the moment you engage the customer and win their business, you must maintain a standard that gives the ultimate experience to your customer including after sales support and maintenance.
Layer3 is proud of its customer service and has been recognized by the industry. This was made possible because of the values we live by, as the saying goes, there’s most times never a second opportunity to make a first good and lasting impression. So whenever we have that opportunity, we do not just create an experience of truth, we strive to make it a magical “WOW” experience and with that you will have the customer always coming back.
So the answer to the question is YES you can satisfy a customer. Kindly enjoy this short video on a customer’s magical experience by Shep Hyken and comment about your favorite experience with a business.
Authors: Charlene Ugah and James Ameh
