Asking Questions in Customer Service

"In this section we're going to be discussing a model known as 123s of customer service. I'm Pamela Unruh with Expert Village. The last consideration to consider in the two portion of our 123s of customer service is to ask questions of your customer. Remember this is a two way conversation when your customer comes in with an issue. Again they don't know your business as well as you do. They may not know the correct questions to ask, they might know the correct verb to use in order to communicate to you what their issue is. This is where it is important for you to get involved and to control this conversation a little bit. Ask questions of your customer, know there are two types of questions that you can ask. The first are simply closed end questions. Closed end questions are those questions that are used just to get very quick information. An example of a closed end question may be "do you like football." A very simple answer there either yes you do or no you don't but it doesn't leave a lot of room for additional information does it. That is where open ended questions come in. If I was to rephrase that question and say to you "why do you like football". You may come up with a lot of reasons maybe you like football because you like the competition, maybe you use to play football and you enjoy continuing to watch it. Maybe you are just a bit Bret Favre fan, It's easy to look at maybe that is why you like football, whatever the answer is and open ended question is going to enable your customer to give you a lot of additional information. That would be useful to you in trying to identify and solve the customers issue."