Perky Customer Service Incompetence – Why Bother? | #cx #custserv
by Kate Nasser | Comments Off on Perky Customer Service Incompetence – Why Bother? | #cx #custserv
Perky Customer Service Incompetence is Bad Customer Experience
I have trained customer service staff on great customer service skills for 25+ years. You must combine upbeat positive attitudes, empathy, and professional people skills with occupational competence. Perky customer service incompetence delivers a bad customer experience. Here’s another real life story to illustrate.
Perky Customer Service Incompetence: Image by Filter Forge via Flickr.
Image by Filter Forge.
Avoid Perky Customer Service Incompetence
The Story & Lessons Learned
Customer goes to a chain pharmacy to pick up a prescription that the doctor had sent in. A very upbeat perky customer service rep says they don’t have the doctor’s prescription. He suggests that maybe it was sent to another location. The customer asks him to find out if that’s what happened. She asked if he could look it up in the computer in front of him. He continued to smile and said he couldn’t. He told her to go to another rep at the end of the counter. The frustrated customer walked to the end and waited on line. That rep found that indeed the Rx has been sent to the other location. The customer said she didn’t feel well enough to drive to the other location. The rep filled the Rx right there in 10 minutes. The customer rated this overall as a bad customer experience. She is now looking for a new pharmacy to fill her prescriptions.
Key Customer Service Training Takeaways
- Train reps to be positive problem solvers. The rep’s lack of problem solving undermined the positive effect of his upbeat attitude.
- Inspire them to care before you train them to smile. Smiling is important. It’s effective when combined with action to find answers and solve the problem. The rep could have asked his colleague how to look up the RX location. Instead he made the customer go to the other rep and wait online again.
- Train reps with more occupational knowledge. Why didn’t the first rep know how to look up the Rx location? Putting reps on the front line with little knowledge nor tools to find answers breeds bad customer experience.
- Train for better teamwork. Did the first rep feel he couldn’t ask his colleague for help? Customer service takes teamwork. In this example, sending customers around to different teammates is not teamwork.
Perky customer service alone doesn’t deliver a great customer experience. Likewise occupational skills and knowledge with a neutral or bad attitude doesn’t deliver the best service.
Combine great people skills, a caring positive attitude, and occupational competence to deliver a great customer service experience.
From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™
Related Posts:
Positive Customer Service Results from Everyday People Skills
Customer Experience Delivery – Prepare Privately
©2016 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission and guidelines. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.
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