Developing excellent customer influencing skills across your staff has an effect similar to having more people working on your team! It significantly impacts your ability to win new business, to keep existing customers happy, and to reduce non-value added work.
Strengthening this critical competency results in happier customers with increased confidence in your people and products, less stressful customer interactions, smoother execution with less second-guessing, and fewer “damage control” activities.
Every customer has “built-in” expectations for your team’s response to an issue. Meeting those expectations starts with understanding what they are:
1) Leader: A clearly identified leader / single point contact
2) Team: An empowered team to address the concern
3) Structure: A structured problem solving process
4) Content: Your rigorous work is the heart of any customer issue response.
5) Updates: No news is BAD news – keep your customer updated; show plans and incremental progress regularly. Demonstrate mastery of the situation, scope, time management, and responsibility for outcomes.
Two of CAEDENCE’s core specialties are Problem Solving and Customer Influencing. If you’re facing a daunting customer situation, get in touch: info@caedenceconsulting.com