Customer Service Recovery Skill #1: Get Off To A Good Start
Service recovery – dealing with escalations, difficult situations and demanding customers – is becoming an increasingly necessary skill for those working in customer service. Not only is rebuilding trust, and turning these situations into positive outcomes essential for customer retention, our research found that it is often the foundation of creating WOW experiences.
This is the first of three installments with samples of the types of service recovery skills that will help you succeed.
Set The Tone
By the time customers have connected with you regarding a problem, they most likely have already made attempts to resolve it. They’ve explored self-serve options or failed to get the answers they need from your AI. They communicated with someone else in your organization without satisfaction. In the process, they’ve become increasingly frustrated and feel that they have already invested too much effort.
This means that, before you do anything else, the two things you need to communicate are:
- That you genuinely care about them
- That their problem is now your problem
Here are three things you absolutely have to do to send these messages:
1. “Let’s see how we can fix this.”
This simple sentence (or something similar) needs to be the first words out of your mouth after the customer tells you they have a problem. It communicates that you want to create a positive outcome, and that you want to work with them.
It needs to come before asking what their account number is, or asking for more details. Customers need immediate reassurance that you are taking ownership of the issue.
2. Validate their frustration
Once you have the details, you need to let customers know that, as a fellow human being, you share their frustration. You can do this informally, with simple comments such as “Oh wow…” or “That’s terrible!” or more formally with statements like, “From what you’ve told me, I sure can understand why you’re frustrated.” They need to know that you understand what they’ve been going through.
3. Tell them the plan
If it is an issue that you can correct right away, tell customers what you’re going to do. If you have to do a bit of research or explore some options, tell them that too. The last thing you want is for them to wonder what you are doing. Saying something like, “I think there might be a couple of options here, and I want to make sure I get the right one so that this is fixed quickly and doesn’t happen again,” goes a long way to letting them know you’re competent and intent on a successful outcome.
Failure to set the right tone at the beginning of a negative interaction can make things go sideways very quickly. Make sure that this is a service recovery skill you’ve mastered before anything else!
“It doesn’t matter how competent or knowledgeable you are. If customers think you don’t care, they aren’t coming back”
