Good Customer Service Skills | Minimize Wait Times
Why make customers wait when most businesses are just waiting to steal your customers? If you see customers waiting today, drop everything to serve them.
In this highly competitive world, most companies find it incredibly tough to attract customers. It requires a great deal of ingenuity and hard work to persuade customers that they should give you their precious money in exchange for goods and services. It is therefore madness of the highest order, having invested thousands (if not millions) to get people to walk through the door with the intent to purchase, for them to find that they can’t do so—because they are kept waiting.
No wonder that people walk away and channel their money elsewhere. No wonder that so many companies go out of business. During my seminars I often invite my audience to raise their hands if they have ever walked out of a place because they have been kept waiting. Most people do.
The pressures of everyday life are such that time is increasingly precious. Few of us can afford the time to stand around in lines twiddling our thumbs and feeling irritated. The longer customers wait, the shorter the time they will be with you.
As you are aware, keeping customers waiting simply indicates that their time is less precious than that of your employees, and that you are prepared to squander your customers’ time in order to make maximum use of your employees.
Visit most banks and you will see evidence of this. There might only be two counters open, with a long line of patient (sometimes impatient) customers waiting to be served—and meanwhile there are large numbers of so-called back-office people flitting around behind the scenes, preferring to shuffle paper and complete the bureaucracy rather than attend to customers who have to rush to school to pick up their children, or get to the hospital for an important visit, or purchase essential items at three other stores.
If your company really does want to create a buzz, there are many little things you can do to prevent customers waiting too long:
✔ Stop any idle chitchat.
✔ Drop everything to serve waiting customers.
✔ Summon your colleagues to open additional counters.
✔ Pull people away from their back-office paperwork to serve customers.
✔ Drag managers out of meetings so that they can serve customers too.
✔ Inform the waiting customers that everything possible is being done to serve them quickly.
✔ Ensure that every person in the company has the skills and know-how to serve customers at the front line, so that when a flood of customers pours in there is ample back-up reserve to deal with them.
These guidelines are simple and rather basic. But if you don’t follow them you will find that customers will increasingly exercise their own choices. Rather than wait they will walk away from you, your company will go out of business, and you will be out of a job.
EXCELLENCE CUSTOMER SERVICE PRACTICE
If you work in an environment where customers come face to face with you and your colleagues, set yourself a goal, today (or perhaps tomorrow), of having a “no wait day.” Try it out and see what happens. Just focus all your energies, all your people, and the whole organization on ensuring that customers don’t have to wait when they walk through the door. See what happens. Then try it again at peak periods
EXCELLENCE CUSTOMER SERVICE POINT
Wait on customers rather than making them wait for you.
