Customer Service: The Telephone Connection

Our comedic hosts have a lot of fun with this subject, but their underlying message is sincere: telephone customer service is an important job and it has to be done well. You don’t get a second chance once a customer hangs up—unless you leave that customer with a good feeling and the desire to do business with you again.

The “customer” part of telephone customer service:

• The greeting

• Listening skills

• Telephone courtesy

The "service" part of telephone customer service:

• Product and system knowledge

• Complaints

• Problem solving

This new 2013 release portrays traditional and nontraditional customer service roles, ranging from a mail order company to a medical setting, from a corporate admin to a warehouse supervisor. These different scenes show that everyone in the organization has customers—even if they are your “internal customer” coworkers.

The narrators also touch on the finer points, such as upselling and cross-selling (when an additional product or service would better satisfy customer needs). They also explain how to handle angry or dissatisfied customers in a way that both solves the problem and ultimately strengthens the relationship.