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How not to do Customer Service

If your Customers take the time to leave feedback – positive or negative, do take time to read it and do act on it. Any steps that will improve your Business, including Constructive Criticism can only help.

Ryanair are famous (notorious?), for example for being quite explicit in their “you get what you pay for” operation. Don’t check in at home? You will have to pay through the nose for checking n at the airport, for example.

This allows them to run a very lean model and keep prices ultra low. If you don’t like it, take your Business elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you want to fly somewhere, have only hand luggage, don’t care what seat you have and follow all check-in procedures to the letter, yes you really can fly to Europe for a fiver.

I’ve heard that if you have a complaint, their policy is to ignore the first one anyway. Lots of people give up at that point if they don’t hear back, so Ryanair only have to deal with those that persist with a follow-up. No staff time wasted on snowflakes.

That model works for them as any flax just bounces off them. As a small Business owner, that can be damaging, possibly even fatal. Please do reply to criticism, or at least amend your practises so that the issue is less likely to happen again. I have become more explicit in my quotes, my pre-course information sheets and my cancellation policies so that there is no scope for misinterpretation. My Clients know what they are getting, how / if they can cancel and the costs involved for instance. If they don’t like it, that’s a shame, but it does decrease my time spent dealing with queries.

Take time (or get a friend) to review your paperwork, your website, your Policies from the point of view of a Client. Do you understand costs, explicit and hidden and do you know what will happen if you need to cancel for instance? The more streamlined your Business, the more profitable it is.

If you want an independent review of your procedures, do get in touch with me as I can help you see your Business from a Client’s eye. See my Website at AndyCrowhurst.com for more information.

Finally, how not to do Customer Service. I’ve recently started to use InPost for my shipping as it’s convenient and cheap. I dropped them an email to say how good it was, along with a couple of suggestions: