Personal Finance

Customer care: The power of staff can build or break your business

care

A water utility official listens to a client during a customer care clinic in Mombasa. Hiring staff that interfaces well with customers is crucial for business survival. PHOTO | KEVIN ODIT

I feel terribly sorry for this lot; they have these grand ideas that require obscene amounts of money to bring to life.

So they scrape and scrounge for every coin, borrow from everyone they know and their grandmothers to put together an enterprise.

Business plans however great don’t really bring much in the way of start-up capital but if they can mortgage that family tucked away in their ancestral land, some hawkish financial institution locks them up in an airtight 15-year Kamiti-like repayment prison.

You get the picture - it takes a helluva lot to start a business. After all that, they turn around and shoot themselves right in the leg. Oh, entrepreneurs!

The calibre of staff we hire as entrepreneurs make or break our businesses. I was treated to this very sobering fact real time last week.

A small domestic airline made a mistake on a client’s booking and asked him to pay for a booking change when he had already done it online.

The system should have had this information. It didn’t. Well, you know technology - it tends to fail you when you need it the most.

The client was shocked and refused to pay any more money and asked the check-in staff to call the manager. The manager for whatever reason didn’t come as quickly as would have been considered good customer service response.

Let’s be reasonable here; a lot of managers do not sit around doing nothing, therefore it is very possible that she was held up by a different, equally, if not more pressing task.

The client complained bitterly about the unresponsive manager and the booking mistake. I stood there watching this unfortunate situation unfold in utter disbelief.

Watching both the passenger and the check-in staff, it was easy to assume that the passenger had been unreasonable prior to my arrival resulting in the lack of acknowledgement from the staff.

After a while, I couldn’t help but ask the client what the problem was. A simple system glitch that did not reflect a payment that the client had made while checking in online.

Instead of acknowledging the system error, the attending staff simply moved on to check him in. The long awaited manager eventually strolled to the counter where we were.

Not a care or concern in the world about an upset passenger waiting for her. She didn’t introduce herself and it wasn’t evident that she was a supervisor until she started asking the staff questions that led us to deduce that she was in charge.

One really must take care to be presentable. If as a business owner you’re going to have your staff uniformed, then high quality, impeccable maintenance and upkeep of the same in not negotiable.

That desirable impressive effect of smartly-dressed airline crew cannot be achieved without this. Take corners and even your top tier crew members end up looking like disgruntled hungry waiters in a low-level roadside eatery - this hopefully is not the look you have in mind.

The upset passenger had to ask if she was indeed the manager - it wasn’t evident. Surely you know as an entrepreneur that customer service staff are the face of your business and are going to spend the time, effort and resources to ensure that your frontline team are the right people.

You can get away with a few short-cuts in hidden areas of your operation but staff without good attitude is not one of them. Proper customer service must be at the core of the company’s ethos.

The passenger eventually asked why there was a problem and why no one as much as acknowledged, owned up or apologised for it. The best that this so-called manager could manage is promise an investigation and feedback thereafter. Wow.

The passenger got to his boiling point and called that exactly what it was - a stupid answer. He didn’t have to put it quite that way especially because it weakened his position as a complainer but I had to agree. It wasn’t the smartest answer I’ve ever heard.

“Hello, my names is Seraphine Ruligirwa-Kamara, I am in charge of the XYZ operation here. I regret that I couldn’t be here sooner, Mr ABC I understand that we have had a problem with your booking payment and that it is a result of a system glitch on our end. I am very sorry that you’ve been inconvenienced, Mr ABC I trust that my colleague, PQR has manually corrected this. I understand how annoying this can be and you are well within your rights to be upset. Here are some of the steps I’ve taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Kindly accept my sincere apology.”

This is all it would have taken to calm this client down, walk him to the aircraft and keep him flying the airline time and again.

This brand of sense may not be common but with a great attitude and some training, it becomes the way in which your clients are handled time and again as a standard.

What calibre of staff do you have interfacing with your clients? If they are like the lot I recently watched in inaction, you’re going to be beholden to your creditors for a while yet because you are unlikely to break even, let alone register any profits in the near future.

Ms Seraphine is an expert on Attitude & Human Potential, [email protected] | @SRuligirwa