How to deal with the always dreaded Customer Service?

How may times you felt the urge to throw your phone to the floor when you talk to customer service ? We all used to call or mail or walk in or shout at various customer service points daily. Frustration is the end result of it in more than 90% of cases. So how can we improve this. Am trying to come up with some information which might help you reduce the stress to this.

Prefer the most high tech  way to contact them


All product service or customer service have different ways of contact, like walk-in, telephone, email, online chat, twitterId's, social network pages / communities etc. Go for twitterid  or email  first to grab attention, then to online chat and telephone. Coz normally they tend to answer these cases more than the phone calls they receive or the people who walks-in to their office.

Be very clear to yourself about the question


Try the basics trouble shooting yourself. Like verifying the power code is connected. Or else you only is going to suffer with a not working device for days. If you cannot find the answer to the problem yourself, then only go for the customer care.

Dont be shy..you are the boss

Dont be shy to ask questions to the customer care, and feel what will they think if you ask a dump question. You are the one who want the problem to be solved, so go ahead with your thoughts. Yes you are the BOSS !

Say I dont want or I quit your service often

If your credit card company charges you a big annual fees, go ahead and ask them to revert it. If they say no go and tell them that you dont want their card anymore. It's more likely they will rethink their decision. Even if you dont want to to quit the card you still have a chance for not canceling it. This is like walking away from a store after saying a half price to  product. Even if the shopper dont call you back, the item is still up there for grabs for the last price the shopper said. You can still walk in there and take it.

Do share your comments below.


Ajith.

Can you say “No”?

Can you say  “No”, to the questions or situations that truly deserves a No. In today's world lots of people cant really do this. You should learn at saying No to new commitments. This reduces your stress and reserves time for what’s really important. Remember when your friend ask you join a party ,a  few hours before the party actually starts. You are more likely to join it , ignoring all your other appointments and commitments you made that evening. You are doing this for the sake of friendship. But what you really forget is the promise you have given to your child or to your family for an outing or anything similar.It can also affect the commitment you need on your work.

The very next morning, you may be regretting the moment you decided to go for the party, while thinking over your hangover.Still it happens again. Have you ever noticed 2 year old children? They have the power of saying No. They will say No to anything and everything they seems don't like it. This always give trouble to parents, later they will learn that they can get more fun if you please their parents or elders. So eventually they too will become people pleasers and will get to have trouble saying No.

This happens in office also. If you are a people pleaser or having trouble saying No, you will see all works comes to your way.  And people will make use of this, and might use you heavily to get their work done by you. So whats the solution to the problem? Only solution is to learn to say No. Practice it with out really affecting any-ones feelings. Please share your thoughts on this.

Regards,

Ajith

Should we say “I Don't Know” ?

Suppose you are in a meeting and one of your Superior is throwing a observation to all , “The details in RPG report shows we are on the right path”  If you have no clue on what a RPG report is , chances are you may keep quiet , keeping your head steady and hope the leader changes the topic soon. Why should you do that? What if you just raised your hand and asked “I don't know what a RPG report is, Can you please tell us?”
If you have done that the superior will explain it and you will start to see lots of relived faces around.

In to-days world people want to have knowledge about anything and everything about the things around them. I have a friend who is very frank in this regard. Even he notice that all people around him knows about the subject, he will simply ask “What is it? I don't have a clue” Even though he is risking to be a idiot , he is gaining lots of information there. Then only we can improve. Googling for everything will give you answer's, but not the right one.

The problem of faking the knowledge is more risky in the corporate world. Imagine a marketing guy meeting one of the prospective clients for the company and agrees to every thing the client asks. “yes we can do it” , “we will deliver it” etc The company may get the contract , but the end result will be a tot-tally dis satisfied customer and a frustrated company management.

This happens in smallest of matters also, that too among thick friends. I have a friend who bought a new mobile which is the same model as mine. A few months later i happened to check his mobile to call some one, as my phone was low on battery. What i saw in his contact list is, that full off Abbreviated names. Most of them just 3 or of characters, which are very hard to understand, even for him. I first thought all were his girlfriends names which he want to kept secret, but when i asked about it he said that there is some problem with the phone keypad, he cant type non dictionary words, which will come as non readable abbreviations.  The only issue was the T9 dictionary was on, he just need to switch it off while typing.
Why he didn't ask this to me? yes I am sarcastic at times which will keep him at the receiving end. But still it could have helped him a lot in his daily phone usage.

To conclude i will say Truth Doesnt Hurt. You are not expected to know every answer to the world. You should say “I dont know” as a sign of strength. And always remember there are questions in this world which Google cant answer, but a normal human can.

To Berry or Bury it

These days media is been full of news regarding tug of war between black berry and governments across the globe. Issues started when Saudi raised concerns about the security issues regarding usage of blackberry services from  RIM (Research In Motion). This was then taken up by countries like Oman and India. When thinking about terrorists using these devices and create problems in our country we will be very much concerned and a quick solution is to Ban it completely. 


Question is whether it is okay for the government to spy on legal and  confidential communication between law abiding citizens? And, will this move to monitor secure BlackBerry conversations in real-time actually stop terrorism ? And how about the rights to privacy in a democracy where all have constitutional rights?

Why Company's insist on BlackBerry ?


BlackBerry system is designed in such a way that, mail is encrypted at the BES (

BlackBerry Enterprise Server

) located in your organisation's data centre and decrypted only at your user's BlackBerry device--at no other point does encryption or decryption happen. The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is based on a symmetric key system whereby your organisation creates its own key and only your organisation ever possesses a copy of the encryption key. RIM says it does not possess a 'master key', nor does any 'back door' exist in the system that would allow RIM or any third party to gain unauthorized access to the key or your valuable corporate data. The BlackBerry security architecture for enterprise customers is designed to exclude the capability for RIM or any third party to read encrypted information under any circumstances. BlackBerry's information governance capabilities are a huge part of the reason why organisations insist on BlackBerry.

Terrorists have also used extremely simple methods of communication. Example in some simply save an e-mail as a draft, and since the password for the e-mail account is known to both sender and receiver, the recipient views the draft too. Even they have used images to hide data inside it. So banning this may not be a solution for all  dangerous communications.


I have nothing against Islam, but still  the only countries that have problems with BlackBerry are Islamic ones, which you'll agree are not exactly admired for their open societies or mature, democratic systems of governance. 


The Telecom department on other hand have lot of other issues to solve first. First the ever awaited 3G, second our Number portability system, third our still not perfect 'Do Not Call Registry'. Also as per latest reports coming not Saudi and Oman has issued statement saying that they are now against the Ban. So  our media and telecom department should make sure not to make this issue just a controversy but to find a solution to the problem all are facing.

Is this Lady luck, Mr Dhoni ?

If there is some one who dont know what Lady Luck is,  should ask our MS Dhoni. Just after a week he tyed knote with his fiancee Sakshi Rawat, Dhoni signed a RS 210 crore ($46 million) deal with talent manaement company Rhithi Sports Management. They will be managing his endorsements from now onwards. This made him overtake ‘God’. Yes our cricket god Sachin Tendulkar is now behind MSD.

Now MS Dhoni is at par with NBA legends Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. The one who leads the endorsement pack is still the one and only Tiger Woods ($110 million), but beware Tiger, the gap is getting narrower yearly.

Today at the time of writing India scripted a win in the last and final test against Srilanka to level the series. Another feather in Dhoni’s cap. No one predicted this turn around after India’s historic loss in the first test which also turn out to be the last Test for legendary lanakan spinner Muralidharan who retired in style after taking 800 wickets in Tests.

Keep riding on lady luck “Captain Marvel”, we expect a lot more from you.