Categorized | All, Complaints

Don’t justify your policies from your perspective

by Kevin Stirtz

Don’t justify your policies from your perspective

Every now and then you’ll have a customer who disagrees with one of your policies. No matter what the policy is, don’t justify or defend it from your company’s point of view.

For example, maybe your service department has a fee for inspecting the products you sell. And unless it’s covered by warranty, the customer has to pay the inspection fee. If the customer balks at the fee, don’t justify the fee by saying: “Our technician needs to get paid for his time.”

Customers don’t care how you pay your technician. The customer is seeing things from their perspective. They are not there to learn your perspective.

It’s better to explain why you have the fee. Talk about how it helps the customer.

The more you can align the reason for the fee with something that helps your customer, the more likely it is they will accept it without further complaining.

As a customer, pay attention to how people explain policies to you. Do they justify or defend them based on their needs? Or do they explain them in the context of how they help you?

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Categories: All Complaints

This article was written by:

Kevin Stirtz - who has written 602 posts on AmazingServiceGuy.com.

Kevin Stirtz is the Amazing Service Guy, a speaker and trainer who helps organizations of all kinds deliver Amazing Customer Service. His recent book: "More Loyal Customers" has won 5 star reviews at Amazon.com. Kevin lives in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis & St. Paul). More at: author's website.

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2 Responses to “Don’t justify your policies from your perspective”

  1. Donald (don) Wambari says:

    Kevin,
    I really connect with what you say! I am setting up a Customer Experience firm to help organisations create and sustain quality customer experience therefore help change life from this end of the world. Have worked 15 years and this si what I got to do now.
    Service quality is a foregin language (well, there is quite some lip service around) and practice is scarcely rare.
    Your content is very helpful. Will keep visiting here.
    Hopefully we’ll meet at the centre with improving service as we work from different ends!

    • Kevin Stirtz says:

      Hi Don – thanks for writing. Glad you’re getting some value from our content here. Please stay in touch!

      KS

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