When looking at how training staff to deal with complaints, what better way to analyse it than in person? That’s where this blog takes place.
I was recently on a train heading back from a uni reunion meet up; It was a Sunday morning, I wasn’t the only bleary-eyed passenger there, and most of us wanted to just get home and see our Mum (it was Mother’s Day, it wasn’t that bad of a hangover!).
About an hour out of home the conductor came round to check tickets. On the table adjacent was a family of four. They had their tickets checked and the father of the family was asking about something that happened at the starting station; he hadn’t been able to print off their tickets because the machine wasn’t working and the waiting in the line at the kiosk would have made them miss the train. He listened to the problem, assured the man it would be ok and if he had a booking ref he could use that as confirmation. He did and everything was ok’ed and he printed him off some new tickets so he could get out of the barrier at his destination. A great way to deal with an issue.
Then he came to our table and the guy opposite me wasn’t with a family, he wasn’t in his Sunday best and he wasn’t as well spoke as the father that just had a problem. He gave his ticket to the conductor and then he mentioned he’d been told to get on the wrong train at destination 1 and left his bag on there by mistake. This is where the customer service completely went out the window.
The conductor interrupted at every opportunity, he didn’t give eye contact, he didn’t sympathise with the mans issue and he didn’t do anything to help other than say “ring our phone support”. It was quote obvious to the guy that he wasn’t receiving the same level of service he just had witnessed with the other family and it was making him agitated, and rightly so; why was he being spoken to as though he was any less important than the other guy?
The man eventually had enough and asked for the conductors name and said he wasn’t happy with how he dealt with the issue but it seemed to make no difference. What was the main issue here with how the complaint was dealt with? Was it judging a book by its cover and not treating somebody as equal as the next person? Did he not know how to deal with the issue? Did he simply not care? We’ve previously gone over how great onboarding can implement customer service and help with your companies overall performance here that backs this up.
Supplying training to your staff to deal with every situation that happens is impossible, but giving an overall method to it is far from that; this issue was very simple to overcome because the conductor had literally just done a great job with another person not 2 minutes earlier.
If you need help with your Customer Service training we have a suite of off the shelf courses that can be a great starting point and we can also create custom training to fit your own policies and procedures.
