Manage wise

Are you putting off your overseas customers?

Servicing a customer who is nothing more than an e-mail address or a voice on the telephone is a different ballgame. Manjiri Kalghatgi lists the Do’s and Don'ts to be observed in long-distance customer communications

• An e-mail message sent to the wrong person
• A spillover of a similar message in a reply sent to a customer
• A subject line that says:

“eSend this to the customer’f

• A mail trail that talks about “eHow stingy the customer is, with praise’f

• Hitting the “eReply All’f button instead of ‘eReply’f

The pressures of corporate life have introduced fiascos in new forms. Forget the prim ties and spanking new shoes, the confident smile and firm handshake. The traditional method of customer service has been turned on its head.

Not just BPO and IT services, but traditional industries such as manufacturing and finance increasingly cater to customers who are based overseas. And for the lady or gentleman calling the shots across the seven seas, all that matters about you is the promptness and quality of your e-mail communication, and the accuracy of your telephonic conversation. So how do you ensure that a customer you may never see develops confidence in your ability and eventually entrusts you with additional responsibility?

Lay the foundation

To begin with, lay the foundation of your relationship with the customer.

Exceed expectations, perform, and be courteous but not servile. Under-commit, over-deliver, but not to such an extent that the customer starts believing that the task assigned to you is exceedingly easy, and that you are overcharging him. For instance, consider the case of an overefficient project manager. So driven was the lady that she would consistently maintain a two-day gap between the delivery date promised to the customer and the deadline conveyed to her team. She and the team would break their backs to finish the deliverable in time, and the triumphant project manager would send it out to the customer two days before the expected date.

Despite the appreciative e-mail she always received from the customer, the project manager failed to realise that the customer did not even have time to review her ‘before time deliverable’ as the customer team had set aside review time only two days after. Soon, this consi tent over-performance led to the customer setting unrealistic deadlines. Worse, in a casual conversation with the programme manager of the customer account, the customer mentioned how easy this project was compared to the previous engagement.

Identify preferences

Early in your professional relationship with the customer, identify his preferred mode of communication: telecon, chat, e-mail, and even the frequency of these (weekly/fortnightly/daily); customise your updates accordingly.

A customer who is extremely busy may not appreciate lengthy telecons in which you describe every aspect of the project at hand. A weekly mail with crisp bulleted points of major developments should do the trick.

However, a customer who is hands-on and has a major interest in the thoroughness of the work may get the feeling that he is being kept out of the communication loop in you merely send him bulleted points. Regular updates on the micro aspects will work here.

Do not try to impress your customers with jargon/technology because you may just end up baffling them. At the same time, you get one up by familiarising yourself with the jargon/technology used at the customer end. Read every mail to the customer all over again, run a spell check, and verify the recipient list before you finally hit the Send button. If you do manage to goof up despite these precautions, make sure you know how to use the Recall Message option. Given that your customer is in a different time zone, he or she may not be online at the time you sent the mail. If you are lucky, you may succeed in recalling a message even hours after it left your mailbox and the customer will never know you goofed. [This tip only works if both the sender and recipient are running Microsoft Outlook.]

A few tips

• Be sure to zip bulky documents and not clog the customer’s mailbox with heavy attachments.
• Avoid archaic language, even with European customers.
• It is all right to begin most e-mail with ‘Hi’ or ‘Dear’, and end them with ‘Regards’.
• Terms such as ‘for your perusal’, ‘eenclosed here with’ and ‘eyours truly’ belong to a different era, and you just might end up being ridiculed if you continue to use them.

The interaction

• Make sure that just one or two people communicate with the customer on key issues, and that the rest of the team is kept in the loop as required. If it involves telecons, ensure that only team members with good verbal communication skills, clarity of thought and technical expertise participate.
• Make sure you are aware of the precise time difference before you set up a telecon across locations. Mail across an agenda, however minor, for a telecon.
• Prepare to take the call in a quiet location undisturbed by chatty colleagues, sounds from the cafeteria, or any other distraction. Open the call with a brief but informal greeting, and stick to the agenda. Never promise things because you can't say no.
• Save all instant messaging sessions.
• Do not use unnecessary 'hmmns' and short forms such as CYL (catch you later) or BFN (bye for now) during chat meetings. The customer may not be familiar with these, or may not appreciate them during a formal meeting.
• If you have a telecon scheduled for 8 pm, do not call before time, or ping the customer if he or she is online before the scheduled time.
• If you hit the mute button in a telecon, the other party can usually figure out you have. Avoid aside conversations.
• If you need to convey something to a team member, write it down. But avoid distracting the person mid-sentence.
• It is best to document every aspect of your customer communication, saving chats and e-mail. In the case of telecons, encapsulate major decisions in the MoM sent out within 24 hours of the meeting.
• Be extremely careful about what you write in these documents. Do not, under any circumstances, inundate the customer with details of a personal problem due to which you cannot meet a deadline. However, in case of a dire emergency, a brief note about the reason for your absence will certainly be preferable to unexplained absence.

Despite the best communication, things could still go wrong if the quality of your team's work is not up to the mark. Communication is the front-end; it cannot replace a sound back-end-quality of the product or service.

The author is manager, business integration, Zensar Technologies