I love these suggestions – they are spot on.

Thanks for sharing!

–Greg

I have three to add…

11. Apologize when you or your company has messed up or inconvenienced the customer – Just because the customer isn’t frothing at the mouth or yelling at you does NOT mean they are OK with what has happened. They are being polite. While this is just commonsense, I am amazed at how rarely customer service people apologize. So much of the antagonism they experience from customers could be avoided and the tension defused if they simply used old-fashioned courtesy and apologized.

12. No amount of friendliness can overcome a lack of functional excellence–This is based on something Diana Oreck of Ritz Carlton said recently that I loved. She was talking about how functional excellence is the foundation of great service. It reminded me of how a colleauge of mine was asked to do “how to deal with difficult customers” training. When the client showed him emails of their “difficult customers” it was clear that the issue was the client’s incredibly sloppy and customer-unfriendly processes that would make anyone irate.They didn’t need yet another customer service program (well…maybe they did, but it wouldn’t solve the problem they were having)….they needed to upgrade their processes.

13. Make sure you have Internal Customer Service that makes excellent External Customer Service possible–I see a lot of businesses that have an “It’s all about me” or “Now what do you want?” ethos that makes it hard for customer-facing employees to deliver great service.

David Lee
http://www.BrandPromisePartners.com