Archive for 'help desk training'

Proven Methods of Customer Retention

It is accepted business wisdom that a returning customer is the best customer. In a competitive market where the customer has a plethora of choices, returning customers indicate that they are satisfied with their first purchase and that they trust you.

Trust is an invaluable component in any business relation and if maintained and nurtured, is an assured asset which will yield returns over and over again.

So a crucial part of your job in retaining your existing customers is to keep them thinking of you. You cannot afford to neglect or ignore them at any stage if you want them back. So you have to make provisions for free gifts, discount offers, add-ons, etc. and make arrangements for mailings and follow ups in order to sustain their interest.

It is easy if your customers come through Internet campaigns, for you can then use email lists to keep them informed and interested.

But in the more traditional brick and mortar world, all this is a bit more taxing and cumbersome for you have to invest in print or media ads and direct mailings. These routes are as effective as your email lists, and to have a better chance, you should add the attraction of special offers, sales, and free gifts.

If you use only email, you need to be especially careful and make sure that you are providing your potential customers sufficient reason to continue being on your list. You could try and make available to them significant information about their interests and preferred topics. If you are able to lure them to your website through your email, you could introduce them to other products and offers.

In the snail mail world, it is to your advantage if you can use coupons to put products on sale. This allows you to compare and measure the relative successes of your different approaches or campaigns, and to evaluate the merits and drawbacks of each.

Send out one sales mailing to half of your customer list, and a different one to the other half, and assess the conversion rates of the mailings. The same strategy can as well be used with email.

Connect with your customers and make records about their interests, wants and preferences. You can then provide customized products and information for their guaranteed satisfaction

Another simple and effective way to build relations with your customer is to send them greeting cards containing a simple expression of your appreciation for them.

 

You could send out the cards for birthdays or anniversaries, on Christmas, Valentine’s Day, or New Year. You could even use these cards as invitation to attend your special sales or for other more direct announcements.

The advantage of greeting cards is that they are more discreet, more personal and more warm, things that your customer may remember you by. 


Get Your Customers to Say ‘Wow!

What is the WOW response? It is not that easy to figure out, is it? The wow response is ideally the kind of response that you would receive from the satisfied customer.

A customer, who walks into a shop, finds what he or she wants and is happy not only with what he or she has found but the entire shopping experience, and also a customer who has discovered the bonus of shopping in a way like never before.

This is the customer who will return again and again to the shop and would prefer to do all her shopping in the same place if possible or even let out a “WOW” every time she walks out of the shop after the shopping is done with.

How can your bottom line meet up to the needs of the response, wow?

One key way of accomplishing this is to manage to slip in as many promises as you can in your sale. The ideal would be to slip in as many promisable items that you can imagine your sale to carry with it.

Once you have done this, ensure that you under promise as in you list a week a delivery time when you merely need 4 days to do the same. Do not shy away from such promises as customers necessarily like them and when you work better than you promise they will be simply thrilled and delighted and you will be rewarded with that “wow” response for which you have been trying all this while.  

Work on the first impression that your concern is going to have on the potential customer.

You have to do up your place or site (whichever applicable) as well as possible. There should be every degree of comfort for the customer when he or she explores your shop.

The visitors should like the colors and the textures and everything your design could do should be aiming to soothe the shopping experience of your customer. You should also impress them sufficiently with your services and the kind of help you are offering your customers.

Your problem solving techniques should be optimized to ensure maximum satisfaction to your customers when they visit your place. Do not make your customer feel left out at any point ensuring that you do not cross over to interfering with her shopping. Thus you have to be friends with your customer more than anything else. Your customer when and if she does come back to your shop should recognize you immediately. So keep a habit of making friends with strangers or out of them in turn.

A wow response is further egged on by the value for money that the customer avails off her purchase from your enterprise.

Prices are constantly climbing nowadays and so you should be sufficiently geared up to display that though your price might seem to be high there is definitely more than expected in store for your customer.

Try and squeeze in gifts or something similar as extra for the best effects. This should be an extra and added over anyway in spite of price deductions.

Keep in touch with them. Try and call them again without being irritating. Birthdays, anniversaries are always a nice time to call.

But apart from thus, this should be a part of your service to call them when possible to find out about them and the product.

There you go, now you know how to get the wow response!


Keep Your Customers Happy

You want to please all of your customers, but the problem is they are all different and unique. Pleasing all of them is impossible. Rather select a small segment and try to please them and automatically the number of happy customer grows.

I know of quite a few experienced business men who usually take a feedback from their customers. This is an excellent method of knowing the needs of the customer but the feedback must be used with discretion. 

However, some business men may make the mistake in taking each suggestion very seriously and thus constantly change their product line and business practices. But this constant change may make the businesses unstable and cause frustration, extra cost and extra work.

Customer feedback is important but their interpretation is critical. You can’t please every one rather try to please those you can. Find out the customer need and then streamline the products and services.

Be intelligent in business. Get focused on what needs to be done and the profits will grow. Choose quality over quantity. Try to please the one’s you can. Trying to please everyone will end up pleasing no one. Create a better strong business by combining your strength and majority of customer needs.

Let’s take here an example of a business woman who owned a jewelry store. She has an expertise on diamonds and 60% of her clientele come for that. She also keeps other gold and silver jewelry. She should have been more focused on diamonds and not dilute her market with other things, and grown bigger. 

She could have done surveys which are diamond oriented and could have become the biggest diamond retailer in the neighborhood, by just adjusting her focus.

Always try to focus on your strengths rather than weaknesses. You’ll prosper as a brand and bigger service provider.

Do your best to please people and leave the one’s you can’t. You’ll have more happy customers and strong and stable business.

Here are some tips:

  • You can’t please everyone, so only try to please those you can.
  • Find out your customer requirements.
  • Eliminate ideas that are not focused on customer’s desires.
  • Build on the areas that cater to customer needs.

Here are some important points you should keep in mind while customer handling:

  • Everyone is different and unique.
  • Customer feed back is essential but your interpretation of that is critical.
  • Pleasing everyone is not possible so try to please the one’s you can and you’ll end up with more happy customers.

You must combine your strength and desire of majority of customers to create a better and strong business.


“Error: Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue.”

While few of the famous computer error messages like the one displayed above can be very hilarious and make you laugh, most of the PC error messages get frustrated or annoyed responses from the computer users. In fact, some of the error messages that are displayed on your computer screen can be quite difficult to understand because either they mention strange file names such as csrss.exe or dlg.exe and have error codes that you have never heard before or the error description does not make sense to a common PC user.

A PC error message can be defined as a message that shows up on your computer screen when it encounters an unusual condition. These messages, which are usually displayed in a box known as a dialog box, pop up on your screen in order to convey one of the following:

  1. Point out that an operation or a specified action has failed.
  2. To indicate that your intervention is needed.
  3. To warn you of an imminent problem like your PC may be running out of hard disk space.

Computer messages have been present in every part of computing be it an operating system, third-party software or hardware devices. So, let’s briefly have a look at what you should do when you see a message pop up on your computer screen.

The first and most essential task is to keep calm. Read the error message carefully. At times, the error messages displayed are just warnings that make you aware of problems that you might face while performing a particular action. So, if you get a warning message, ensure that you are completely sure of the task you are going to perform before proceeding.

Next, if the message reports of a type of exe error, dll error or runtime error, it is best that you use a good search engine to find out the methods to resolve the error. If you are lucky, you may find the solution in the Microsoft Knowledgebase. If you don’t find anything here, you can look for a solution on a third-party help website or web forum. After you find a solution, follow the methods listed in the solution to resolve your error message.

Well, now that you know how to deal with computer error messages, let us have a look at some of the tasks that you can perform to prevent these errors to a large extent.

  • Keep your antivirus and antispyware tools updated and schedule daily full system scans to prevent and remove malware.
  • Keep your hard disk clutter free and contiguous with the help of the Disk Cleanup and Disk Defragmenter tools.
  • Keep your PC software updated with the latest security releases, service packs and patches.
  • Run a good PC diagnostics tools on a regular basis to ensure that all your hardware and software is free from errors.
  • Use a good registry cleaner tool to regularly scan and clean your registry to prevent problems caused by unwanted registry entries.

Help Desk Support Staff Skills

Help Desk support staff differs for a technical support desk and a help desk for customer service. The technical support desk faces special additional technical challenges.

In the hiring process, most managers look for a high degree of technical aptitude. While a technical understanding is essential in delivering support to users, also important is the ability to communicate and empathize with the customer’s situation.

Surveys have found that while managers might perceive the most sophisticated tech support rep as being the most valued by the customer, surveys find that IT support professionals who possess the highest level of empathy tend to win highest evaluations from customers. Their empathy drives them to find an answer and explanation for the customer and to focus on customer satisfaction. Technical aptitude alone will not ensure success as a tech rep. Aptitude and help desk training in both technical and specialized customer contact skills are requisites for a successful tech support desk.

These are some of the unique issues facing technical support. Whether dealing with internal customers, or external, the technical help desk needs a high level of people savvy, technical knowledge, and diplomacy.

The temptation in scheduling training for help desks, especially technical help desks, is to place all emphasis on technical skills and either ignore training in customer contact skills. However, the skill in which the help desk agents communicate with customers determines the customer satisfaction rating of the interaction, and directly impacts the customer friendly reputation of the help desk.

Help Desk Training must include a focus on customer service skills. Without these skills, calls will take longer, help desk professionals will experience more stress and burn out, and the frustrated customer will take much longer to hear the solution to the problem and feel less satisfied by the interaction.

The technical helpdesk staff needed some guidelines for politely, but clearly communicating what they could provide, while still pleasing the customer. This can be accomplished during a help desk training seminar. Help desk training in customer service helps technical professionals demonstrate their technical skills by using excellent customer contact skills.