What Customers Want from their Customer Service FIRST and FOREMOST

When Customers approach their Customer Service agent for help, they often come with a lot of preconceived notions, hopes and fears. The manner with which they deal with their customer service agent, is often colored by their previous experience with that same company or other companies in the same industry. As they approach the customer service desk - they often have the following thoughts in their minds:

• Who's this person? Will he/she be willing to help me out? Will he/she even be interested in what my issue is?
• Will he understand what I am talking about? Will he be helpful or will he make me feel stupid? Am I just gonna be entertained and dropped, or worst, get blamed for the problem?
• Will he/she be smart and resourceful enough to give me a real solution? Or am I really wasting my time right from the start?

As customers ourselves, we know there's a lot of emotional “extras” that comes with customers' requests when they approach customer service agents for help. If customer service agents recognize these “extras” and seek to deal with them FIRST, they can make a HUGE difference in how their clients' feel about their user experience.

What clients look for FIRST and FOREMOST from their customer service agents are the following :

• an assurance that the customer service agent is engaging him/her as an individual, that he/she is NOT just a number, and the customer service agent is interested and eager to help.
• that the customer service agent recognize his/her issue as important, as much as he/she does
• a sense that the customer service rep is listening, and that the agent understands the issue as well as how it affects him/her.
  
• an assurance that the customer service agent is accountable and that the agent is not going to disappear and drop him/her

The FIRST priority for Customer Service Agents, is to COMMUNICATE these assurances, via their ability to empathize, how they communicate and the words they choose. Everything they say and do (and not do) delivers a certain message to their clients, regardless of whether they mean it or not.

If Customer Service agents are cognizant of these “emotional needs” before they start diagnosing their clients' issues, they will often time find their clients a lot more agreeable and constructive when they work together towards a resolution!