How to improve your communication with customers?
As a person who works in communications skills and presenting field, I care about our communication with customers.
When we look closer, we can see that there are some weaknesses in this part. (no matter if it’s a big business or a small one).
Since I wanted to use real samples of sale mistakes, I used a pen in my pocket once which had a small hidden camera on top of it. Then I showed the videos to my students in “effective communication with the customer” ‘s workshop. My students couldn’t stop laughing because of the clear mistakes that operators and sellers made, face to face or on the phone.
Then we called the company at that moment and got the same reaction on the phone, the same mistakes!
The interesting part was that the participants heard and saw their employees mistakes and understood the mistakes that they have never noticed. But it was there. Some simple mistakes but common!
Let me show you some statistics from Customer Services for Dummies written by Karen Leland:
You can improve your customer service by reading this book.
1- We are ready to pay 10% more for the same merchandise and get a better service.
2- We talk about the excellent service we got to 9 to 12 persons.
3- When we receive bad service, we talk about it to 20 people.
This book also explains the factors of customers’ dissatisfaction:
Communication with customers is all that matters if you don’t want to lose your customers.
Useful tips and ways to communicate better with the customers
When you are on the phone, and you finished talking, don’t hang up! Let the customer hang up first. After you heard the sound of hanging up or the beeping, you can hang up the phone. Because the customer thinks you don’t respect and value him if you do hang up first. Another reason is that the customer may remember something to say after he said goodbye, so you need to wait and don’t let him hear the beeping sound.
You have to be polite, kind and official. Do not use the phrases in the left and use the right ones.
| wrong phrases | our suggestions |
| what? | Pardon me, can you repeat the address, please? |
| your address? | Would you tell me your address? |
| Hang on… | Could you wait for a few seconds till… |
| I don’t know… | Good question. Thank you for asking. Let me find out the answer. |
| It’s finished. | I think we still have a few of it. Let me check it out, and if we have run out of it, there are other similar suggestions for you. |
| One of our guys will call you back. | Mrs …, one of our colleagues from … department will call you in less than… minutes. |
There are many rules like this which I will explain in other articles.
