Published on: May 9, 2009 by Maddy Mattocks
Scenario:
The original post was made on FreshBooks blog, by it’s CEO Mike McDerment. I am just copying paste the article here, describing there incident. Once again I am lazy to relate it to our situations.As web hosting customer support company this should give you a clear picture on dealing with our customers. The reason I am quoting as it is , I like the customer, Andrews forwarding of the customer to the CEO itself and many other things. So read on. Read the real article @ http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/
Perhaps you’ve heard this one before: “The customer is always right”.
Frankly, that’s not true. Frequently customers are incorrect, confused, or have been misled by a third party. It happens all the time and it can be a real challenge to handle when they are convinced they are right.
Over the years we’ve had people tell us we’ve taken away features, but the truth is those features never existed. Other times people have come to us because someone told them we did something that we do not. All of these instances can be hard for our team to handle, and when communication becomes a challenge, like any relationship, the biggest factor is the person on the other side of the table.
That said, we’ve got the best customers in the world hands down. They are professional and smart – and often just too darn busy to give us a hard time because they are entrepreneurs (see professional and smart). But we’ve got enough people using FreshBooks that we get a good number of outliers too – people who can be a challenge for one reason or another.
Last week we were working with a demanding customer. After a lot of back and forth, let’s just say some feathers were ruffled on the FreshBooks end of the relationship. In an effort to break what had become a cycle of frustration, Andrew did the right thing and cc’d me on an email to the customer suggesting that he was tapped out and that the customer now had access to the CEO. Only one problem, Andrew started the email like this:
“Hi [Customer XXX], I don’t believe this to be a fair statement.”
And that’s where we made a mistake. While Andrew did not say this customer was wrong, I’m certain that’s all he heard.
Andrew is a super sharp guy and had invested a great deal in this relationship – I know him well enough to know this was just a moment of weakness. But I’ll tell you what, it did not leave me with many options.
Fortunately, the customer in question proved to be a fair and reasonable individual, and wrote a fairly comical reply to Andrew and I:
“…customers are always right – especially when they are wrong.
Get used to it. :)”
This dialog continued and we got things sorted, but the moral of the story is, when you’re providing service it’s not about being right. It’s about supporting people on the other end of the line. Andrew did the correct thing by sending this person my way because he did not see another path to making the customer happy. That’s the right call.
Category : Customer Care, General, Training
Maddy has been with the industry for the last 12 years and is an Account Manager for few of our customers. He loves to optimize the webserver, database and is interested in setting up high performance clusters.
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