For most of us who run businesses, competition and customer’s expectations necessitate great service. If you deal directly with customers you have had more than a few situations where you had to work with a customer who was behaving badly even though you would have preferred to strangle them. All of this in the name of protecting our reputation and encouraging repeat sales.
I would submit to you that there might be a portion of your business that is the antithesis of everything you are working for and you may not be aware of it. There may be employees of your business who believe that customers are guilty until proven innocent.
For all the accommodation and customization you try to offer your customers, they are rigid and unhelpful. Worse yet they also tend to be hardest on your best customers. Have you called your accounting department lately?
I get it, the accounts receivable department is the motive power of any company. If you don’t get paid to put up with those difficult customers, and the good ones, business will come to a screeching halt. The challenge is that sometimes great customers who pay their bills will get sideways with your accounting department over a transaction and in a single contact your relationship can be undermined, even if you step in and resolve it.
Let’s look at an example of this. We had a large part that had a large core charge. We bought it close to the close of the month and to avoid having a large core charge on our statement we had the core ready and returned it as the new part arrived. Apparently the core did not get credited back to our account before the company closed the statements and it appeared on the bill. My Dad and bookkeeper made the decision to deduct the charge from the check they sent and note it to the recipient. Boy was that a mistake. After a few days the check arrived and fell into the hands of one of the company’s bookkeepers – and the fun began.
The call began with a snotty, “I need to speak to the accounts payable department.”
I replied, “We have a bookkeeper that comes in once a week. How can I help?”
“I’ll need to speak to them….” Let me stop here because I think you can see where this will go and the last thing I want to do is have one of my prized vendors get the impression I am talking about them. This conversation is sadly the most common way accounting departments approach their customers.
I would suggest a better way to get information to solve a problem with numbers requires human interaction and might go better like this: “Hello, I am insert name here, with one of your prized vendors and I have a question about your recent invoice could you tell me the best person to talk to about that?” This seems obvious to the sales folk amongst us, right? So, why is it not obvious to many accounting folks? The answer lies in why they are so good at numbers: they are built that way.
From the time I was 13 my mother, an industry customer service trainer, has been a certified trainer in personality styles. She has taught us the ability to identify a person’s personality style early in a conversation. This has been an invaluable tool to relate to them better.
Some personality styles gravitate toward certain types of professions. More often than not, career bookkeepers and accountants fall into a combination of a couple of personality styles that value precision, caution, stability and less interaction with other humans. They are not great at solving problems on the fly. They like to think about things and then, they are some of the best problem solvers. With that said they like to work on the problem and not on the people.
Herein lies the problem with having them make the most difficult customer service calls that your company makes; the “you owe me money or I think you do” call. To further exacerbate the problem the person on the other end of the line is often a polar opposite who moves fast, talks fast and has little patience for anything that takes them off task, and oh by the way, has already received a dozen sales calls today.
So what do we do about this to make sure that our most difficult customer service situations are handled well? My suggestion is to select a different personality style with a different skill set to be the envoy and let the bookkeepers do what they do best. You need someone to make that initial contact who is skilled at collecting information in a friendly but thorough way. They will also need great follow through and patience. It is very important to possess good listening skills and problem-solving skills because sometimes the story is true and sometimes it is not.
The most important thing is that they understand that the numbers on the screen have to balance in more ways than just mathematically if you want the bottom line to not reside within brackets. It really boils down to this: customers who are treated well, even if the mistake is theirs, are more likely to be better customers.
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