The worst words to use when trying to solve a customers issue...

One of the very first things I taught as a trainer back in my days of the lovely field of Call Centres was to never try to solve a customers issue/problem/concern by starting off with the statement, "What you will need to do is..."

This will often cause the friendliest of customers to go off the deep end with a tirade of "Who do you think you are for telling me what to do..." The "What you need to do is..." statement can only be beaten by "I can not do that!" as a response to a customers request.

Customers are not part of your company or trained on the inner working of how things are suppossed to be done. When a problem does arrise you need to make them your friend when you try to help. Change the two statements above into the following and you capture a much more pleasant response.

"What you will need to do is..." becomes "I can help you made the needed changes today..."

"I can not do that!" becomes "Let me see what I can do..."

The key is to turn the negative into a positive. You are 9 times out of 10 going to get the customer to do all the work or lower their unattainable expectations of a solution by simply showing empathy. With the negative or positive wording of your reponse you are saying the exact same thing, the only difference is your customers impression of your help.

The above came flooding back to me today as I tried to help a customer pay his invoice to us by having it split between two of his companies. I was told by out admin staff "We can't do that..." I work for the company and can't get a compromise, imagine the customers reaction if he had called my admin person and heard that. In the case where a customer is looking to pay you for services provided you need to be flexile on how you get your money and making the customer feel good.

Let's see if the customer pays...