Saturday, October 16, 2010

Changing your employees mindset on how they see difficult customers

We need to change the mindset of the employees who think dissatisfied customers are a problem. I have read in his newsletter sometime ago, that Ron Kaufman highlighted that the words you use to your employees about your customers is very important. He gives one example that in Disney World, they call customers that are complaining "Customers" and others "Guest". So if there is a problem customer, the staff will call the manager saying "a customer wants to see the manager". When your employees gets nervous, defensive, and confused when they are managing a difficult customers, this is partly because of their mindset that the customer is a nuisance or problem. So if we change their thinking they will treat difficult customers better and in most cases that I have noticed, the difficult customer will become your loyal customer. That is why I refer to customer complaints as "comments". Because comments is something for us to improve. Therefore each company needs to set clear and concise company does have and don’ts, and also clear organizational training and discussions to help employees interact with customers to enhance the customer experience. What I do in my daily preshift briefing is to let the staff highlight what issues they have encountered. If they have solved it, how they have done it. If not, I will open the situation for discussion and later choose the best solution and also give some of mine. By doing this your staff will be able to deal with different human conditions when the situation arises again.