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Anticipating Customer Needs
19/02/11 11:03 Filed in: Top Tips
The best time to handle customer enquiries is before they happen!
Successfully anticipating customer needs allows you to reduce complaints and queries by tailoring your service to meet those needs in advance. When the calls do come in, it allows for a quicker, focussed response and improved customer relationship management overall.
Here are some Top Tips to help you achieve more proactive customer service...
1. Pay attention
What situations are your customers getting into? What issues are important to them? What are they telling you? What questions are they asking?
2. Look for patterns
What kinds of issues do your customers have regularly? Can you make a list of categories? How do they tend to react to certain types of situations? What specific help or information do they tend to ask for in these situations? Do particular kinds of customer react in predictable ways?
3. Identify ‘issue flags’
What are the first things that customers say or do which let you know they are a particular category of customer in a specific kind of situation? What lets you know it’s “one of those”?
4. Be pro-active
When you identify that a customer is in a particular kind of situation, use some pro-active empathy to show that you understand their predicament and you’re awake to the kind of support or information they need. Show your expertise and commitment by seeing a few steps ahead of the customer and confidently taking charge of their problem.
5. Take preventive measures
At an organisational level, once you have identified repeating problems or common information roadblocks, look for ways you can change your processes, or introduce new ones, to prevent customers getting into difficulty in the first place.
6. Pay attention
Always listen to what an individual customer is telling you. Otherwise there’s a danger that you’ll recognise a certain issue flag and go into a rehearsed routine to solve ‘the usual problem’, only to discover too late that in this case the customer’s needs were quite different.
Here are some Top Tips to help you achieve more proactive customer service...
1. Pay attention
What situations are your customers getting into? What issues are important to them? What are they telling you? What questions are they asking?
2. Look for patterns
What kinds of issues do your customers have regularly? Can you make a list of categories? How do they tend to react to certain types of situations? What specific help or information do they tend to ask for in these situations? Do particular kinds of customer react in predictable ways?
3. Identify ‘issue flags’
What are the first things that customers say or do which let you know they are a particular category of customer in a specific kind of situation? What lets you know it’s “one of those”?
4. Be pro-active
When you identify that a customer is in a particular kind of situation, use some pro-active empathy to show that you understand their predicament and you’re awake to the kind of support or information they need. Show your expertise and commitment by seeing a few steps ahead of the customer and confidently taking charge of their problem.
5. Take preventive measures
At an organisational level, once you have identified repeating problems or common information roadblocks, look for ways you can change your processes, or introduce new ones, to prevent customers getting into difficulty in the first place.
6. Pay attention
Always listen to what an individual customer is telling you. Otherwise there’s a danger that you’ll recognise a certain issue flag and go into a rehearsed routine to solve ‘the usual problem’, only to discover too late that in this case the customer’s needs were quite different.