Hey, That’s Out of My Control!

I cannot count how many times I have been told by someone that something “was out of their control”. As that should be reason enough to satisfy me for the problem that I am experiencing. As far as customers are concerned, however, your problems are your problems and they are of no concern to them!

It is true that your own internal problems are of no concern to your customers. Your rules, procedure, and issues are of little concern if they stand between a customer and what they want. The bottom line is, if you fail to give the customer what they need or want, your customers will likely leave and do business elsewhere.

But what about times when something REALLY IS out of your control? Maybe your town had a massive power failure and that caused delays in delivering or producing product. maybe a supplier failed to deliver a shipment as promised, or maybe weather played a major role in disrupting deliveries. Whatever the reason, certain things will always happen that were out of your control.

Yet you must react and take care of the customer! How do you do that?

The first thing to do is apologize to the customer and explain what went wrong. The apology is important because it shows you care about your customer and the inconvenience they are experiencing. An apology costs you nothing but can go a long way in soothing hard feelings and making the customer feel positive again towards you and your business.

The most important thing you should do, however, is when something does happen that is out of your control, look at what happened and try to figure out what you could do to minimize the problem should it happen again.

For example, if your supplier fails to deliver a product as promised, perhaps you should look into a another source and split orders so that if one supplier fails to deliver you could call the other and get a prioirty delivery. If weather causes you a problem, maybe you could come up with a customer notification process where you would call the customer ahead of time and offer an alternative delivery date should they not be able to deliver. Whatever the situation, by making yourself protrected against future reoccurances, you create a more stable environment for your customer.

Business success is all about providing the very best value and experience for your customers. If you can do a little pro-active planning and analysis, you might just be able to head off those “out of your control” situations in the future.

And that makes everyone happier!

The Customer Service Training Institute
http://www.infowhse.com