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When a customer has a problem, do you go out of your way to explain to
them what happened? It isn’t always a good idea, especially if it’s
complicated. Now I’M going to explain!
I recently went for a haircut and my favorite salon had just changed
locations. They had a number of minor problems as you can imagine. They
were being handled efficiently, one by one, when the telephone repairman
arrived. He asked the receptionist what the problem was and she told him:
they had 4 incoming lines (corresponding to 4 "outside line"
buttons on the phone), and line 3 was really ringing on the button for
line 4. He said, "Oh, that’s not a big deal" and then
proceeded, I’m not kidding, to spend the next five minutes explaining
why this was happening. "All of your outside lines come in on the
main panel, and then I take those lines and connect them to the posts for
each of your lines on the phone here. Each line comes in on different
color wires; one is a solid color and the other is the same color combined
with white, so you’ve got your blue and blue/white, your orange and
orange/white… like that. The posts are really little connectors and you
just push the wired down on them. Anyway, all I have to do it go into the
panel and find the wires…"
Good grief! The receptionist doesn’t care about all that malarkey…
she just wants her phone fixed! From the way he explained it, he could
have fixed it and been out of there in the time he spent explaining it.
I’m guilty of this, too. Years ago I was working at a computer
service bureau as a programmer. (A service bureau was a business that
provided computer services to companies that had a need for them but were
too small to have their own computer. Needless to say, now that computers
are so inexpensive and relatively easy to use you’d be hard pressed to
find one today!) The customer needed to get his invoices printed and there
was a bug that caused every invoice to get the name and address from the
previous invoice. I proceeded to explain about the program and reading the
customer names from the tape and that there was a logic error and a buffer
wasn’t being cleared… he got very aggravated. He didn’t care about
any of that… he just wanted to know when his invoices would be ready!
Don’t do that to your customers! If they have a problem, tell them
you’re sorry and that you’ll fix it right away… AND THEN FIX IT. Don’t
bore them with the details unless, of course, it is absolutely necessary.
You run the risk of a) making them feel stupid because they don’t/can’t
understand the complexities of your particular situation, b) irritating
them by wasting their time, and c), telling them something that may shake
their confidence in you.
I know it’s tempting to explain, but use good judgment. Repeat after
me:
"I’m sorry, I’ll fix it right away."
"I’m sorry, I’ll fix it right away."
"I’m sorry… "
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