“Please leave the accommodation
clean and tidy as
YOU
would wish to find it.”
This was the instruction in the welcome letter for the accommodation I was stopping in on holiday. What a dangerous statement…I just hope I never follow my sister-in-law in to any holiday accommodation….her standards of cleanliness leaves a lot to be desired!
This reminded me of a saying in Customer Service:
“Treat your customer as you would like to be treated.”
Again, what a dangerous statement. If I treated all my customers the way I’d like to be treated I’d be forcing my standards on to them. How do I know that their standards and expectations are the same as mine?
Our saying at CFA Training is
“Treat your customer as they would like to be treated.”
This will help you provide personal, individual service, helping you to build rapport and make them feel special…and not as just another customer.
Different perceptions
Before introducing this concept to delegates when I’m training I run an exercise in my customer service courses where I ask the group to write down their answers to 5 questions:
- My mother smokes a lot of cigarettes, how many does she smoke a day i.e. how many is a lot?
- My next-door neighbour won a great deal of money on the lottery a few months ago, how much did they win i.e. how much is a great deal of money?
- My sister bought an expensive pair of shoes last weekend, how much did she spend i.e. how much is expensive for shoes?
- I drive too fast around town, how fast do I drive i.e. how fast is too fast in a built residential area?
- and finally……and I ask the group to be careful with this one: My brother is middle aged, how old is he?
Using a flip chart I go back over the questions and record the highest and the lowest answers for each question. This is always great fun as the results always show big differences between highs and lows. This exercise shows that our perceptions / opinions vary greatly on everything.
Our natural defence mechanism
I then challenge a couple of delegates on one of their responses, telling them they are wrong and that I agree with another delegate who gave a different response. The result: they defend their answer.
This natural defensive response occurs in customer service interactions when a customer has a different viewpoint / standard / opinion / belief to you etc. These differences can cause us to respond in a manor which can lead to confrontation or conflict. In the very least, the customer will walk away feeling a lack of engagement or that feeling of just being another customer.
The answer
Most customers feel and think differently to us……we all have different perceptions on situations. The customer also has an emotional attachment to their query, you don’t. Providing excellent customer service is not necessarily about agreeing with everything our customers say (though if we can we should), it’s about respecting their viewpoint and responding to them on an equal level, using empathy and understanding, reassurance and direction……to help them.
Training in how to provide excellent customer service must give staff the skills to control their natural instinct of defence, and show them how to use empathy and reassurance statements to build rapport with their customers.
Different means different not wrong. So…
“Treat your customers as they would like to be treated,
not as you would like to be treated.”