Friday, November 30, 2012

5 Tips for Dealing with Cranky Clients

Unreasonable customers are always a pain, but they're especially prevalent and stressful during the holiday season!  But keep your cool and resist the urge to "tenderize" your clients during their massage sessions with the following tips:

1.)  Remember: The customer is always right - I know this is probably the hardest to accept, but customer service experts have long said that a happy customer tells one or two friends, while an unhappy customer tells several--or in the age of social media, hundreds of his closest strangers. And these statistics can be magnified by the emotions related to the stress of the holiday season.

2.)   Train employees to cope with problem customers - Hold staff meetings between the end of October and Thanksgiving to do scenario training and discuss best practices for dealing with nightmare customers.

3.)  Hire enough holiday help to minimize customer frustration - Staffing up adequately during the holidays can prevent a lot of aggravation for both customers and employees. If someone is already upset and then has to wait a long time on line or on hold, this will only add fuel to the fire.  Also overworked employees also may mishandle customers.

4.) Don't promise what you can't deliver - Promising your clients the sun, moon and stars is great but not so great when you can't deliver.  If you say you're going to try to do it and you don't do it, their problem becomes your problem. You always try to please your customer, but don't give them a reason to heap blame on you.

5.)  As a last resort, be willing to lose the customer and the sale - If you offer your best plan for resolving a problem and the customer is still being difficult, it's okay to part company and refund the purchase price.

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