Not long ago, I encountered a problem with my new
phone’s battery which was draining fast after every short-term usage.
Without
much hesitation, I called up the company’s customer service department to
figure out a solution for that problem.
Attending to my call was a young
American and I have been blown away by the amazing service provided by him.
I have
always think one of the biggest challenges in customer service is the emphasis
of tone.
In fact,
there are a multitude of ways a customer service personnel can help clients to
solve a problem, countless methods to persuade someone to choose a sale and a
myriad of measures to make customers happy.
You can be
excellent in providing solutions to everything that comes to you, yet it can
still not be enough. For example, during a 10-minute conversation with a
client, a customer service personnel may not necessarily focus on tone and
emphasis exercises.
That is to
say that the verbal tone is an extremely tool in judging whether a person is
cheerful, pleasant or robotic.
The way
that how a listener perceives you when you are talking indicates the parameter
of the excellence in your job. As a matter of fact, producing great results in
something you do is hardly enough and creating impressions is even harder than
we can imagine.
It can be
obvious of course, to notice how the others perceive us. The way someone
replies and body language are a good measurement of how much people like us.
And that is
the reason I am talking the importance of the emphasis of tone in a conversation,
just like the customer service personnel did in the other day. He was calm and
patient, taking note of every minor details I pointed out without showing any sign
of ostensible cracking up.
Sounding
overly cheerful to create a lasting impression may seem a little under-rated
and eagerly asking too many unnecessarily questions would put someone’s teeth
on edge.
The
question is, how to improve and elevate the level of customer service
performance in Malaysia?
You know it
is important to be nice to everyone because your profession is about dealing
with people besides maintain positive attitudes. The problem is, as human
beings, we are not always in good mood. We would not always be as motivated as
at the beginning of doing something new.
One of the
ways to drastically improve customer service is to inject the sense of purpose.
Xandria Ooi, a Malaysian TV and radio personality, wrote about working with
purpose.
It is the
sense of purpose that enables us to distinguish between working for money and
working for happiness and pride.
Not only in
customer service, the idea can be well applied in almost all working industry.
If you are
working JUST for money, you are waiting for the clock to hit the five every day
and expecting to get your salary by the end of the month. For you the job is
about getting a fixed amount of salary and there is no point to work with any
sense of purpose.
However, if
you are working because you can see happiness in your job, you are expecting
different kind of challenges in your work every day. You may not be moving
briskly or working enthusiastically but there is no ambling.
Of course,
everyone is expecting an income for their job but going to work just to work
makes the definition of a job sounds even more mundane.
When the
computer diagnostics was completed, I was pleasantly surprised when the
friendly customer service personnel told me that I was the most polite customer
he has ever attended to since he started working at the company almost one and
a half year ago. Funny.
‘And you speak good English too’, he added.
I could do
nothing except for saying thank you to him for his great service and assistance
without dragging the conversations any longer because my ear was feeling hot by
the heat exuded from the phone.
Instead of
treating his comments as a compliment, I found them hilarious.
Although I
was flabbergasted and extremely honoured at the notion of getting praise from a
native, I think my proficiency in that language is just somehow above average
and I had little or no confidence each time I am speaking English.
Despite
attending a national primary and secondary school, I seldom speak English with
my friends like I do for now. In addition to that, English is not my mother
tongue.
The only
reason I was more fluent in Mandarin than English was because I spent most of
my childhood watching Chinese movies and speaking Mandarin.
Neither do
I attended a single Chinese tuition nor been to any essay writing classes.
Which may be translated into another way of saying me have a mediocre proficiency
of Mandarin.
The only
writing of English essays I had done were short stories contributed to a school
column for a year.
When I
started out writing column for this blog, I had given little thought to
writing. At the beginning, it took me few hours to write and put down all my
reflections into several pieces of paper.
I nearly
lost my cool at some points as I ran out of ideas and feeling the urge to wrap
up the latest article.
Today, I am
still writing and I have to say writing has enabled me to really grow as a
person. Most of the time it involves deep self-reflections and discipline, it
is a journey of my mind. Little did I thought that writing has become part of
my life.
The great
news is, I used writing to strip away unnecessary distractions in my mind and
let my writing to do the talking.
By: Vincent Ti
