How to be a Customer mind reader

Andrew
Feb 21, 2018
2 min read

There's someone in your organisation who answers phone calls about your Facility/Pool/waterpark. Many times the newest employee will be that person. The most frequent questions will probably be about,

operating hours
food and beverage policies
group rates
directions

Questions are good and very welcome but most times customers will not fully disclose all the details about what they are planning and will fill in the blanks with their own assumptions and often these assumptions result in complaints that YOU have to fix.

Here's a real situation that highlights this,

Tuesday morning before Memorial day weekend

Guest: phone call "we are going to have our own birthday celebration there, can we buy tickets in advance?"

Employee:" sorry ma'am we currently don't sell in advance, but you can buy them on the day"

Guest:"OK thanks"

Memorial day Saturday afternoon

A group of 30 people show up with coolers, uncooked burgers, chafing dishes and burners ready to cook their food and buy admission. Unfortunately the waterpark is at capacity. Employee:"i'm sorry ma'am we don't allow outside food, coolers and you can't cook your own food. Also we are at capacity due to the holiday weekend and we can't let anymore in" Guest;" I called up Tuesday to buy my tickets in advance and no one told me this, i want to speak to a manager, we have 30 adults and kids here to celebrate a birthday and you're telling me we can't come in!" You can imagine that the conversation doesn't go well with the manager and complaints of rudeness and unprofessionalism are made. The guest tells you that you have ruined their whole birthday party, made the kids cry and they will sending a letter to your corporate office (where you know all the complaints will be hugely exaggerated). BUT, Whose fault is this situation?

Don't we still live by buyer beware?

We also live in the Google generation where people expect to be provided all the answers without doing much research. In addition if you dare to point this out you will be accused of poor customer service. Use the following tools to help reduce disappointment causing complaints

Anticipate that your guests will not disclose all the details. They will assume that because they know then you will know.
OVER communicate, ask lots of questions and give more information than asked for. You may insult some peoples intelligence BUT you will save more disappointment in the long run.
Create a FAQ page on your website and refer people to it every chance you get.
Encourage every caller to call before arriving to check on availability due to capacity.

Finally, use this story above as a training tool in your IN service training to ask your staff,