If your business is providing a product or service of any kind, eventually you will have to provide some form of support, at least if you want to stay in business. But how do you handle a customer when they have stupid questions?
What made me think of this? Well yesterday, I had a stupid question of my own. At the time, I was desperately trying to figure out why an event was not displaying properly. Therefore, I wrote into the designers and asked them. I enter this and this into the box, but those dates do not display.
The next day I received a reply, “If you wish to display archived events you have to enable it in the settings”. Now I did not want to display archived events, in fact it was working perfectly. I was just to engrossed in what I was doing to realize that I was in fact asking the stupidest question, and they still answered me with a solution to my apparent problem.
My first urge, when I receive, what I perceive to be, a stupid question, is to inform them that they have just asked a stupid question. However, it is a much better idea to take a step back and remember that we are all human, in our own little worlds, and need a little grace now and then.
So here are some tips to help you handle stupid questions:
Take a breath and smile.
The first reaction is not always your best reaction. So if you find yourself ready to go off on someone on the phone or you just typed a ragging response in under 30 seconds…calm down, take a breath, and smile.
Remember perspective.
This is your product. You have worked hard at it, you understand it, you customer may not. Your customers do not spend their waking hours thinking about your products, you do. So remember from your customer’s perspective and provide a little grace.
Seek to answer the question respectfully.
Answer the question; provide them with the answers in a kind and respectful way. Unbelievably this is all a part of customer retention. If you are snarky or arrogant in your response all you are going to do is turn your customer over to another company who will treat them better. We are all aware of companies that provide 100% appearance that you are an annoyance and that they would prefer to not have any customers so they can focus on their work. That is ridiculous.
Your customers are you lifeline. Respond to them as if their question is not stupid.
A woman once bought a computer from a local store. She set it up on her desk, positioned herself, and pressed the power button, ready to immerse herself in her new purchase. Nothing happened. Furious she picked up the phone and began to tear into the sales manager about the flawed computer. “Can I help walk you through some steps to get it started?”he replied. “Fine” she said, still not content that she had to phone tech support just to get a brand new computer up and running. “First things first”, he said, “Is the computer plugged in?” She looked and promptly hung up the phone on him. She had forgotten to plug the computer in.
We all have stupid questions, do stupid things, and we all receive a stupid question now and then. Just make sure you handle it properly.
What's the stupidest question you have asked?