Customer Care Tip – Give your customer your full attention. Don’t multi-task!
Are you setting your employees up for failure? Is your organization unknowingly creating a climate for poor customer service? About now you’re saying to yourself I would never do that. I want my employees to succeed. I also want my customers to have the best service possible.
When dealing with the public or customer’s outside your organization, if you don’t give your customers your full attention, someone else will. Soon they will be the competition’s customers.
When dealing with the customer’s inside your organization, be they internal or remote, failure to give them your full attention will lead to unhappy customers or users. It can lead to a rift between the corporate office and the remote users. It can lead to a rift between the home office employees and customer/support service.
You’re probably thinking you don’t know me. I can do more than pay attention to the caller on the telephone support or customer service line while doing chat support with one or more customers. You may have a walk-up client while working a service request while assisting your caller and person on chat. You may be building or repairing a computer for deploying to a remote office at the same time as assisting a caller. They all require concentration.
You may be good at doing more than one thing at a time. Some people can listen while working on something else. Even if you can do two things at once, don’t multi-task.
We listen better when focusing on just one thing. The only way we can give our customer our best is by focusing on them, only them. When you multi-tasking you risk providing inferior service.
It is not okay if you’re helping a customer to do more than one thing at a time. Why not? When you’re not giving your customers your full attention, you are giving poor service. You leave them with a bad impression. You set yourself up for future failures. For example, you are helping a customer while building a new computer. You increase the odds of configuring the new machine incorrectly and thus receiving another service call.
We need to be at our best when we’re with customers. There can be no exceptions. There can be no excuses. Unfortunately, management often feels they are not getting the most from their employees if they are not multi-tasking.
Many times management unknowingly places their delegated tasks like daily metrics, license compliance, inventory management, etc. ahead of caring for their customers. Sometimes workloads are heavy. We may feel we do not have time for customers. We don’t have time to get everything done. I completely understand. I’ve been there. Still am. Often this forces internal customers who have no option to accept the second-rate service they’re receiving. It can generate into a downward spiral when they give low marks on customer satisfaction surveys.
The good news is when your customers get your full attention good things happen. When you focus just on your customer, they will notice. The customers are happier. The complaints go down. People notice. They experience better service. They see how conscientious you are. You connect with them.
Additional benefits gained include providing a better level of service. Better customer care occurs because you understand their needs. You help them get what they want. They see the distinction between how you help them and how your competitors do.
There is a payback. Your customers will have increased loyalty. They are likely to refer business to your organization. You’ll get the reputation of caring. They will enjoy doing business with you.
Customer Care Tip – Give your customer your full attention. Don’t multi-task!
Image Credit: By Bart Everson (Flickr: Multitasking) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Jimmie Aaron Kepler is a writer of speculative fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and reviews books. He’s written for Poetry & Prose Magazine, vox poetica, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Bewildering Stories, Beyond Imagination Literary Magazine, Thinking About Suicide.com, Author Culture, FrontRowLit.com, The Baseball History Podcast, Writing After Fifty, Sunday School Leadership, Church Leadership, Motivators For Sunday School Workers, The Deacon, Preschool Leadership, Sunday School Leader, and The Baptist Program. For sixteen years, he wrote a weekly newspaper column. He has written five fiction and poetry books. All are available on Amazon.com. His blog “Kepler’s Military History Book Reviews” was named a 100 Best Blogs for History Buffs and has had over 750,000 visitors.
