Do Your Staff Serve You Well?

Part of my role as an event host or facilitator, is to get to the heart of issues raised by conference delegates.

At a recent conference about customer engagement, the thorny subject of customer call handling was raised by a number of attendees. Their main gripe was the standard of call handling made by employees of some large organisations.

Few of them could stand (apart from those confounded menu answering systems) those occasions when you hear this sort of thing: “Hello, I’m Stacey, thank you for calling Harold’s Humperz…we can move your parcels worldwide and how can I help you today”? in a high-pitched shrill and without a scintilla of warmth or empathy for the caller. The so-called customer engagement here is just relegated to “going through the motions”, or toeing the party (company) line.

Worse still was this beauty I wrote about some time ago.. “I’ve been moved to write this as I recently called a local professional firm here in North London. The lady on the other end of the line was foreign and English was not her first language…it don’t suppose it was even her fourth or fifth language either. I had to spell my name very slowly, “it’s J-E-R-E-M-Y J-A……… and so on. If it wasn’t for the fact I needed some information from this particular firm, I’m sure I would have slammed the phone down and gone elsewhere. At least the Stacey’s of this world have the ability to understand you, well up to a point”.One of the topics I cover in one of my public speaking courses is employee training, or rather basic employee training and to be more precise, how to answer the telephone properly!

As I’ve mentioned before on many occasions, an incoming customer call maybe a cold call in reverse and should be handled with kid-gloves….. don’t forget that as you never have a second chance to make a first impression.

If you’re an employer, please ensure your staff are up to it and can take calls properly.

Tags: Customer Service

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