Go It Alone

From Flickr Artist Hryck

That’s kind of strange advice in this day of teamwork and all, right? So let’s square this away right from the beginning. I don’t mean try to do all the support for something on your own. You’ll need others on your team to help out.

What I mean here is this. Have the customer do as little as possible to fix their problem. As much as possible, go it alone and handle the customer’s problem on your end.

• If your customer wants to cancel their account, go ahead and do it for them. Don’t send them a long set of instructions with links on how to do that from their end.
• If you customer wants to switch their cable TV package, go ahead and switch it for them. Don’t shuffle them off to some other department or require them to go into an actual store.
• If a customer wants to return something to you, pay for the shipping and send a label to them. Don’t make them to figure out how much a package weighs and which option to choose to send it back.

Last week, my card that I have on file for my phone expired. I tried the confusing phone tree options for self-service and go no where. Finally, I just went down to the local AT&T store to have them take care of it. Turns out that it’s something that even they have to call into customer service for.

Thankfully, I had a great rep that did it all on his own. He jotted down some notes about the new card number and what other account changes I needed. He then called in and sat on hold for me. He handled all the back and forth with the other support rep. I literally didn’t have to do anything.

That’s how it should be as a customer. If someone reaches out to you with a problem, fix as much of it as you can on your end. The customer doesn’t want to tie up more time with this ticket.

Take care of it yourself so the customer can get back to work.