Act with urgency.
When I work with customer service providers, I have to remind them to live and die by urgency. I’m going to make a (perhaps brave) assumption and say that all companies that wish to be successful need to value urgency when it comes to customer service.
In customer service, especially the type of customer service where you’re working on resolving customer problems, urgency has to be a priority. It has to be a priority because customers want their issues resolved quickly. They don’t want to wait a few more hours or a few more days – they want their issues resolved five minutes ago. Almost everything else is too slow and not urgent enough in the eyes of many customers. In most cases, the customer’s issue is not mission critical in the bigger scope of things, but as long as the customer thinks its important, it should be important to you and your company.
To act with urgency, your company doesn’t necessarily have to resolve issues in 15 minutes. However, it can’t waste time. Customer service representatives have to communicate to customers that they are working on resolving the issue at hand as quickly as possible. Companies that believe in urgency don’t stall and don’t make excuses for why things aren’t happening quickly – they forget the excuses, apologize, and fix the issue. If customers believe that customer service representatives are making a genuine effort to resolve their issues as quickly as possible, they will be more understanding.
Just like doing little things, acting with urgency is just as much a cultural aspect of a company as it is an operational process. The company needs to communicate with customers that it values urgency and it needs to help customer service representatives act on that. If a company doesn’t do both of those things, it probably won’t succeed.
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