How to make your customers feel stupid

From LauraBenjamin.com

We all know ways to make our customers feel stupid, don’t we? Sure we do! Do we want to make our customers feel stupid? Of course not! Do some of us do it by mistake while others give into “the dark side” and do it on purpose? Yep!

When I worked as a customer service agent for a check-printing company, we got calls from customers who had just received their box of checks in the mail.

They’d follow the instructions on the box and review the numbers of each pad to make sure no checks were missing. Then some would call us to say, “There’s a pad of checks missing from my box.”

So, we’d ask them to go back through the box and read the number printed at the top of each pad. When they read the number from the third pad from the bottom, they’d say, “See, I’m missing a pad of checks!”

Then we’d ask, “Can you lift up the top sheet on that third pad of checks and read me the number of the check just below it?”
(This was the magical moment when the agent could make the customer feel really stupid.)

There would be a very long pause, and then, in an embarrassed tone they’d say, “Ohhhhh….THERE it is!”

Yep. The reorder form is always on the third pad from the bottom and contains the beginning number of the NEXT check order.

It could have been real easy at that point to roll our eyes, sigh and use a condescending tone to make ‘em feel really, really stupid.
OR, we’d say, “That’s okay. You wouldn’t believe how many people make the same mistake!”

Then we’d laugh a little together about the crazy things humans do and end the call with a happy customer who was now more likely to order again.

YOUR THOUGHTS?

Are there times or circumstances when you can easily make your customers feel stupid? How do you avoid it? Are there people on your team who can’t resist? How do you “educate” them and redirect them to more respectful interactions?

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