Hi all,

I'm in dire need of advice and tips.

Just started a new job mid April at online retail store.

I'm in charge of fulfillment, shipping and customer service.

Dealing with customers and replying to emails is rather new to me. Being on the other side of the phone and being nice is rather new to me :P

Thing is I'm having trouble replying to customer related questions, especially in the area of disgruntled customers who shout first talk later.

Is there a site or book that gives examples on how to reply to certain situations?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Kindest Regards,

Eugene

Eugene,

Welcome to the forum and to the industry. Having trouble with the hard ones, hey? Well, bless your heart, and again, welcome to our world!

There are only about one billion books - - and some simple google searches will source them for you.

Since you're a relative newbie, I would start you out on some Kenneth Blanchard - - Raving Fans, etc. See the bookstore right here on the Forum. He's a good read, short and easy, and he's dead-on. He's also a very spiritual and principled man. I've had the honor to meet him several times, so I am biased!

The best experiential advice that I have to offer is this: pay close attention to these disgruntled customers. It is from them that you will learn the most: about your organization, your product(s), and yourself. Hear what they are saying. Don't let defensiveness get in the way of the message. Whether their angst is valid or not is irrelevant, because it is VERY valid to them.

Oh, and second best experiential advice is this. If the disgruntlement comes in written form...PICK UP THE PHONE AND CALL HIM/HER. Do not respond via mail or email. It's perfectly ok (and probably most wise) to recap your telephone conversation (with hopefully the subsequent agreed upon remedy) in a "wrap-up" email. But tone, attitude and intent NEVER come across correctly in written form. You must hear them.

Good luck!
Karen

Karen, I think I mentioned in a different topic the same Blanchard you did. (But I haven't gotten the books as of yet.)

When you say learning comes from the customer, that reminds me of a particular area of a job I had which involved a lot of that. Not just because of really bad training and just leaving me to run with it, but also because there was no connecting of the dots at the foundation. This was a situation where we delivered service to a client by providing customer service to the client's customers. The client (the foundation in this context) knew so little about the needs of the customers and didn't have the channels of support set up to answer to rather basic things. Along the way, I was learning about umpteen different "client-side" departments and names and "for this, call that" and "if you need this, you have to be a member of that," and so on. What I was hearing from a customer was what paved the way through a mess, and I began to create order for myself. Didn't necessarily mean I managed to get what I needed properly from the right people (due to lack of connected dots), but the needs out there are what formed my understanding of what the job was. And I graduated into understanding rules that apply to one kind of customer vs another and all those specialized things.

That experience had a lot of personal dissatisfaction for me when I could not get people to connect (for a customer that had come to me), but I became the go-to person in little time once there was evidence that I could resolve an issue and that news of this ability could be shared with others. I figured out what I (and anyone I needed to follow through) was there for via the customer experience and the customer "ask."

There are an infinite number of possibilities that could contain a customer not getting what they need through a lack of foundation (information) and somebody having to find their way through the customer they hear.