Connecting: Listen to what customers say in order to keep them

You should be happy your customers are complaining. "If they are complaining it means they are still willing to be your customers," said Jim Roudenis, franchise director for Aire-Master of America in Nixa. If you're not listening, you may be losing customers.

Being a good listener is essential to keeping customers, correcting mistakes and improving your service. Signs of poor listening include, making assumptions, defensiveness, giving unwanted advice and passive listening to name a few. Often, poor customer service is due to poor listening skills, as the following examples illustrate.

Making assumptions

"I was five minutes late to my doctor's appointment and my new doctor chewed me out for being late. I told her not to be too hard on me since the reason I was stalled was because I was held up in a car accident. There had to be about 200 cars waiting for the mess to clear up," said Lucy Billingsley.

Lucy's doctor let emotions overshadow the importance of listening. But the doctor didn't learn her lesson even after learning of the accident.

"She went on to scold me, telling me I should have used my cell phone to call her. I told her I didn't have a cell phone and there wasn't a pay phone handy in the middle of the highway!"

A good practice is to notice angry feelings or distracting emotions and realize you may not understand the entire story, so ask questions rather than becoming defensive.

Defensiveness

Let's face it, it never feels good to hear something bad. Once again, emotions come into play. I had my own experience several years ago when a restaurant changed the way it made its salads. When the waiter came by for the third time to ask if everything was good, I had to tell the truth. "I miss the dark green lettuce that used to be in the salads. I really don't enjoy a salad made only with iceberg lettuce."

At that point, he sent the manager who promptly told me I was wrong for liking dark lettuce and all the other customers liked the way they had changed the salads.

The restaurant closed down about three months later. Coincidence? Maybe, but if that was their attitude about every complaint, it isn't surprising. According to Roudenis, "Statistics report that 68 percent of the reasons customers leave are because they didn't feel like they received what they wanted." Defensiveness is a sure way to leave your customers wanting more and going somewhere else.

Unwanted advice

A friend of mine, I'll say her name was Sarah, hired a bookkeeper to review her QuickBooks and to fix any mistakes. Since the bookkeeper charged by the hour, Sarah didn't want education.

"I told her from the beginning that I didn't want any education on the subject but simply wanted the mistakes fixed. Instead she kept trying to incorporate a lesson into her work. I found myself getting nervous about the cost."

Sarah had reason to be nervous. The bookkeeper charged her even for the time she spent talking about her personal life. The bookkeeper made money on the first call, but the end result was that she lost Sarah as a customer.

Passive listening

Just because someone hears you doesn't mean they have really listened. Active listening involves asking questions, interpreting emotional signals and reading between the lines.

Kathy Iman and her family were dining out when she noticed something that looked like a big chunk of butter in her baked potato. "When I mashed on it with my fork, I discovered it was a jagged piece of hard plastic."

Kathy notified the waiter who told the manager. "I was polite and I told the manager that I found this piece of plastic in my food. I was shocked at his response. He told me that it happened all the time because of their method of cutting butter. He told me not to worry; it was just a piece of plastic off of the tub of butter. I had to ask him to replace the potato with a new one."

"I told him before leaving the restaurant that I was disappointed with his response and that as a manager I expected him to take charge of the situation without having to ask him to replace my food. He said that because I was so polite, he figured it wasn't a problem for me and that his explanation was enough."

(Marlene Chism is president of ICARE Consulting in Springfield.)