Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service Excerpt: Introduction

I’ve spent my entire career in customer service management and over ten years writing about how to provide exceptional customer service. One of my books, Customer Service Training 101, 2nd ed., offers detailed training to equip you with the necessary tools to handle your customers well. But as a customer service expert, I also understand that as a frontline employee you’ve got to handle many situations that are far from ideal, and that can’t all be covered in a training book--scenarios that leave you scrambling to know what to say and do. Let’s face it:

Working in the customer service field is not easy! What happens when you deal with customers who are demanding, rude, angry, overly analytical, overly friendly, or even intoxicated or mentally unstable? Any of these behaviors can have you searching for the right words to say and the right actions to take. Your training often eludes you when you need it most! When you deal with customers who demand unrealistic outcomes, are combative, call you names, yell, butt in while you’re helping another customer, blame you for something you didn’t do, or are agitated you’re likely to stumble as you attempt to regroup, recover, and move on. As a service provider, it’s your job to give great service to every one of your customers but you know it’s often difficult to achieve. And sometimes it isn’t the customer who behaves badly.

What happens when you inadvertently say or do something that causes a customer to become upset or angry? Perhaps you said something patronizing, sarcastic, tactless, or embarrassing. You realize your blunder and wish you could take back the remark, but you can’t. So you don’t say anything. Or you say something that makes the situation worse. And what about those situations in which you have no clue what the customer is talking about, or perhaps you were distracted and didn’t listen to your customer? You wish you knew what to say to get back on track but you don’t say anything, hoping you’ll figure out how to handle the interaction.

It’s because of these less than ideal situations that I wrote this book. What if you developed the skills and knew the right words to say to handle any challenging behavior or situation and get the customer on your side so that you could complete the interaction by finding the best solution to the situation quickly, correctly, and with a great attitude? What if you developed the skills to quickly recover when you’ve made a blunder with a customer? What if you knew the right words to say to diffuse any situation and maintain control of the conversation?

Power Phrases for Effective Customer Service provides the necessary tools to do all that, including over 700 phrases and scripts that you’ll be able to put to use in your own work environment and giving you the ability to effectively handle 30 different challenging customer behaviors and 20 challenging employee situations.

I'll post more excerpts each week from Powerful Phrases for Effective Customer Service, available on amazon.com