From the course: Customer Service: Problem-Solving and Troubleshooting

Make customer service easy: Standard operating procedures

From the course: Customer Service: Problem-Solving and Troubleshooting

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Make customer service easy: Standard operating procedures

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- Ask yourself this question, how confident are you that everyone in your company knows the best way to respond to customers both effectively and as naturally as possible in a variety of situations? Customer service can be challenging. You can't plan for every single thing a customer might say to you, but you can be more prepared than your competitors. Contrary to popular belief, your customers will often have very similar challenges and problems for you to deal with. It's always possible to identify five to ten great responses to almost every customer service issue you're likely to face, and to train your staff to use the appropriate response based on the customer in front of them. Now, if I only had a dime for every time I've worked with teams, sales teams, service, customer-facing people, and they say, "But what if the customer says this? What if the customer said that? What if the customer did this?" And they're right, we can't plan for every "what if" but we can break things down to bigger overall themes like common customer complaints or challenges, and make sure that everyone is prepared. If it's true there are a finite number of situations that your staff will deal with, then it seems equally true there are a finite number of best responses. Let me be perfectly clear. I'm not suggesting that there's a direct one-to-one response for every issue with a single answer. If this were the case we wouldn't need customer service at all. We could all just have robots ready to accept customer abuse and spit out the best answer. My business coach once told me that if I wasn't prepared in the most basic sense to answer my customer's questions then I didn't deserve the business, and he was right. So here's a simple exercise. Look at your own business or the company you work for and try to identify the most common scenarios you have to deal with. Better yet, take the time to meet with your colleagues and write down all the complaints, criticism, and feedback you deal with on a regular basis. See which are coming up most frequently. This will give you a solid starting point to build the best and most appropriate responses to solve your customer's issues.

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