Donna Bordeaux shares three ways pottery studios can keep customer service strong when short-staffed: text customers instead of calling, send short videos rather than voicemails, and build an FAQ page to cut down on calls.
It's time for me to rant. The great resignation has flipped our economy on end and now everybody you talk to is understaffed. Well, I want you to take a step back and think about what that really means and how you treat your customers. I am having so many issues with getting people to return my calls when I want to give them money. I'm actually trying to buy two cars and I can't get the salespeople to call me back. What is going on? When I finally got a hold of the salesperson, he said, yeah, I'm sorry, we're really busy. That's not an excuse anymore, folks. Everybody is really busy. Limit the amount of people that you deal with if you need to, but provide good follow up and customer service. Let's talk about what that is. That doesn't mean you have to spend your whole day returning phone calls. Instead, how about a text? Maybe take a phone number. If most people are calling from their cell phone numbers, go ahead and just try to text them back. Tell them we have a backlog. We'll get back with you in a week if that's what it takes. Tell them we have our products only available online. Please check website and let us know what you want to order, whatever that may be. Make it a simple way for you and your staff to follow up with people rather than just leaving them hanging and leaving them mad. The second way you can do this, Record a video. I'm doing videos for my clients all the time. I want to explain things, but I don't want to leave a 5 minute voice message for them if I can't reach them. And I don't need to interrupt their day if it's just me telling them an answer. And it doesn't need to be an ongoing conversation. So work on some ways to make sure that you are keeping your customers happy. People are not doing a good job of this in general right now, so you'll be the superstar if you can figure it out. Think about common questions that people ask and if your staff is answering the phone, provide them with answers to common questions. Ask for an email address, perhaps on your V. If you're getting voicemail messages, you can email them a response and have a cut and paste scenario to answer commonly asked questions. Or, heaven forbid, take the most common questions you are asked that people call you about and put an FAQ page on your website to answer those frequently asked questions. Save yourself some time, save your customers some time and let's make everybody happy again and offer great customer service. I'm Donna Bordeaux with pyopaccounting.com Please follow us on Facebook and Instagram. Make sure you check out our blog and our website from the link below. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when we post. To contact me, email me@donnapyovaccounting.com Sam.
