Greg Canty Fuzion Blog

We had a really interesting networking session at the recent Business Owners Network event at Dublin Chamber.

This group of business owners meet pretty much every second Friday morning, bright and early from 7:30 am till 9am. The sessions always involve some informal networking over a coffee and normally there is a guest speaker about some topic of interest.

(I would highly recommend it to business owners in Dublin – great for networking, learning, contacts and new business)

At our recent session, which I was privileged to chair we did some formal networking by breaking the room into circles of six people allowing each person a proper chance to share with the others what they do. At the session we also looked for people to share their number one business tip, which was quite interesting and varied.

At the end of the session each group were asked to share their learnings, which again generated some really interesting topics;

• Nothing beats meeting people face to face
• Listen to your customer and be open to changing your offer according to what they need
• By listening to others you always learn something new
• Cold calling can be quite enjoyable!
• Don’t be afraid to ask for the business

My big learning from the session was that you should never under estimate the wisdom that experience brings – in every conversation with someone you nearly always learn something new.

I was chatting to one of the attendees, Sean who was passionate about customer service. The gist of the conversation was that customer service has disimproved generally and that there is huge customer frustration in particular with the call centre culture whereby you rarely get the feeling that someone is really ‘on top‘ of your problem.

You know the drill ..you call, you are often in a queue to be heard, you go through a sequence of pressing numbers, then you give your account details and eventually you get a chance to describe what is wrong. From here you can end up being passed from pillar to post, each time repeating your details and the nature of the problem.

In fact when you have an issue you need to put a good half hour aside as the whole process can end up taking that long.

He used a great expression to demonstrate what a great process would look like. You just want the person you speak to first to say: “Don’t worry, I own your problem now” and leave you with an assurance that they will see it through until it is sorted.

Do you own your customer’s problems?

Greg Canty 

Greg Canty is a Partner of Fuzion who offer Marketing, PR, Graphic Design services from our offices in Dublin and Cork, Ireland

Tags: Business Owners Network, Cork, Dublin, Dublin Chamber of Commerce, Fuzion PR, Graphic Design, Greg Canty, ireland, Marketing

This entry was posted on May 31, 2015 at 11:25 am and is filed under Customer Care, Handling Complaints, Networking, Staff training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.