Don’t Ride The Roller Coaster

Humans are emotional beings. Whether we are seeking customer support or helping out our customers, emotions come into play. This can be awesome for establishing positive relationships, a sense of urgency and empathy with your customers. It can also go very wrong if you let frustration and stress take over.

Whenever you interact with your customers it’s important to start off with the right attitude and a well thought-out strategy. This will help you provide outstanding and consistent customer service.

Be Yourself

At LaunchRock we feel the best way to give quality and consistent customer service is to always be ourselves. We agree with Tony Hseih of Zappos that the best performance, ideas and relationships come when a person feels as comfortable being themselves at work as they do at home.

Unless you approach each ticket with the right frame of mind it’s easy to stop being yourself when you’re answering questions all day. Everyone gets frustrated or stressed sometimes and this can affect how we treat people. Here are a few strategies to help find yourself amidst the influx of requests from your customers.

Take a Deep Breath

Here at LaunchRock, we use UserVoice for our ticketing system. This outstanding tool gives us a daily summary of our customer contacts. It is easy to see each morning how many emails we have received and it’s equally easy to scan through them to assess what is going on.

UserVoice published a great article about viewing the que of emails for the day and then stepping away from your desk. This is advice that we echo. It is important to find out what is going on and then take time to get the right approach and attitude to handle the issues at hand.

Stepping away to take a breath and prepare yourself is very important whether it’s at the start of the day or in the middle. Do not let yourself get overwhelmed or hurried in your approach. These contacts are opportunities for internal growth in your company and growing your customer base through customer evangelism. Don’t let them pass you by because you’re in a rush – take your time and your customers will appreciate and reward you for it.

Personalize Your Responses

It is easy to get repetitive. A snag in your UX or a piece of missing functionality might be found by tens, hundreds or thousands of users. This can result in a lot of the same questions coming to your inbox throughout the day.

Some subjects require a concise message that contain similar details from one response to the next – especially when dealing with a set process. This is where a canned response can be useful. Just don’t let this be your habit when it is not necessary.

Your customers want to know you are concerned about their issues. They took the time to email you with some valuable feedback about your product or service. Take a moment to let them know you are replying to them personally.

Read through their questions, comments, concerns and make a reply based on this information in the best way you can. This is a huge step in building an awesome relationship with your customers and helping them understand your company culture.

Did We Mention Be Yourself?

Being part of a founding team means that the product or service you offer is a part of yourself. This is a representation of your ideas and values. Shouldn’t your customer service reflect who you are as well?

It is much easier to convey genuine advice, service, ideas and explanations when you are speaking to your customer as you would anyone else you come in contact with. It is too easy to fall into a pattern of robotic reactions and response when you see similar issues throughout the day. Step away if you need to. A personal, thoughtful reply sent an hour later will be better received than a terse one sent a little earlier.

LaunchRock strives to offer the very best we can in customer satisfaction. We also take pride in our ability to offer professional care for each customer by being ourselves.

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