GREAT Resilience
How to be buoyant in customer service
If you speak with lots of customers every day, the chances are there are times when you face a few ‘No’s’, or maybe complaints and challenges. Over time, your resilience is eroded, diminishing positivity performance and the service you provide to your customers. Remaining buoyant means that you are able to stay positive, motivated, and solution-focused in the face of customers being unhappy with, and rejecting, what you have offered or said.
Buoyancy enables you to give the best version of yourself in each customer interaction, regardless of the outcome of your previous customer interaction.
Here are some tips to help you to stay buoyant in customer service:
- Control your response
How are you responding to what has happened? Pause, reflect and consider how you will respond to a ‘No’ from your customer. Will you feel defeated or annoyed? Or will you accept that sometimes you do get a ‘No’ and not allow your emotion to carry over into the next customer interaction.
- Ask yourself:
- How personal is the customer’s response? It’s not always personal – sometimes the customer says ‘no’ for lots of reasons outside your control! The more productive reaction is to think, “How much of this is personal?” This helps you to reflect on something that you could have done better or differently in the conversation.
- Does it really always happen? We often perceive setbacks as pervasive. How often have said, “That always happens!” But of course it doesn’t. Learning to isolate a ‘no’ to a specific conversation, and consider why it happened, will help you to learn more about how to react more productively when it does happen again.
- Is it permanent? Perhaps you have had a series of ‘no’s’. You might be prompted to think, “Well that’s it, what’s the point?’ But actually, is this really going to ruin everything? Is it really going to undermine all of your future efforts? Probably not.
- Consider what might go wrong
Propel yourself forward to after your conversation with your customer and pretend that it was a huge disaster. Ask yourself:
- What went wrong?
- Why did the customer say “No”?
- What will I do to reduce or prevent the possibility of this happening?
This means that you go into your conversation prepared, confident and with a strategy.
Take a look at our GREAT resilience programme and if you’d like to explore this topic or any other aspect of customer service training then please do give us a call on 01582 463464. We’re always here to help.
