SHOW & CHAPTER 19: THE PERSONNEL GAP - WILLIAM EASTMAN

The third element in building and maintaining an effective customer relationship is having the right people with the right personal characteristics with sufficient authority to solve problems. Based upon expectations created in marketing and sales, your personnel must demonstrate they care about the customers business and aspirations or problems you are here to resolve. During their interactions with customers, they need to be emphatic in emotionally charged situations - deal with the emotion first, then move on to a solution.

Show Objective
Given the shows on the promise and recovery gaps, create an environment where the customer-contact personnel can help the customer win while protecting the financial health of the company.

EPISODE 89: Summary
All of the personnel engage in the customer contact process must have (1) intimate knowledge of how to get things done in your organization, (2) understand how the customer will use your offer and results they expect, (3) have the authority to fix the majority situations they will encounter, and (4) demonstrate empathy when dealing with unhappy customers.

Topics:

• What support do you need
• How does the customer use your offer and their history
• What can't you do
• Move from defending to observing

EPISODE 90: Access to Customer Knowledge
This is critical. You need to have a historical perspective on this account. That includes what has been purchased before and who they know inside the company. You need to arm yourself to deal with 2 problems: dealing with their frustration with failure to deliver on promise, and know what you can do before the conversation starts.

Topics:

• Understand the Customers Need
  • B2B - Competitive Advantage
  • B2C - Lifestyle
• Customer's History with You
  • Original Purchase and Who Sold It
  • Addition Purchases and Other Inside Contacts
• What Happened that Created this event
  • Collect Inside Information on the Situation

EPISODE 91: Empathy (Sincerity – Value Their Business)
Now for the hard part. Unless you are the person that made the promise, this is not about you. They are going to take it out on you and this is a great opportunity to demonstrate service skills. The place to start is to have an out of body experience - imagine you are watching this exchange, not the person being beat on.

Topics:

• Triage the Situation
  • Complex vs Simple Problems
  • Emotional vs Rational Response
• Deal with Emotion First - Don't Stop It - Let It Run It's Course and Summarize to Demonstrate They Were Heard
• Deal with Complexity Second - Have Them Tell The Story From Beginning to End, then Summarize to Demonstrate You Understand the Problem

EPISODE 92: Assurance (Competent and Empowered Personnel)
Once you have discharged the emotion, now is the time to move into problem solving. Now you can summarize by eliminating the emotion. This will allow you to eliminate the exaggerations to reduce the cost to the business.

Topics:

• ​Summarize the situation to demonstrate you understand
• Ask the question - what would it take to make you whole - move them from emotion to rational
• Offer an alternative solution that you could make happen right now - if necessary
• If that is not enough, what else can you do to fix it - what will it take to make it feel like the customer won - you want to keep it away from management

Next Show/Chapter 23: Getting Inside the Customer

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