Look at the truth of global corporate existence – companies don’t exist without customers.
Sustaining and growing customers is vital to the strength of the corporation and critical to bringing in revenue. As a result, companies spend a considerable amount of money looking for creative ways of not just keeping customers, but ensuring their happiness.
This level of customer happiness can be in several areas and is not just limited to the following – product quality, customer satisfaction, level of service, corporate performance. The truth is that while the corporation is satisfying you by providing a quality service or product at a reasonable price, you are satisfying the company by contributing to their revenue growth, and providing feedback for product or service improvement, as applicable. It’s a win-win for both when there is high product and service satisfaction.
Realize that maintaining positive and sustainable customer relationships is one of the goals of any corporation. To put it simply – they want you to keep returning to their store or keep leveraging their service for eternity. Corporations will do anything to hold on to you as customers and use their representative in various capacities to ensure customer happiness. You may be aware of some of these types of individuals:
- Bank tellers
- Airline stewardesses
- Gas station clerks
- Grocery store cashiers
- Hotel bell boys
- Call center representatives
These are just some examples. But what do they all have in common? They are constantly dealing with the masses of individuals that are coming into and out of the corporate institution – and their goal is to contribute to the customer value chain by ensuring you, the customer is happy, since they are at the intersection point between the company and customer.
If you look at any of the examples above, these individuals are dealing not just with you but hundreds of other customers to make everyone happy. They are trained to be congenial, to put up with cranky customers, to put up with upset customers, to deal with the crap we may be complaining about, to satisfy our needs.
If you are like me, there will be times, when you are upset about a service, have a general question about a product, buying groceries, or checking into an airline where sometimes you may just overlook the person trying to make your day.
In the spirit of John F. Kennedy I ask not what this representative can do to help you out, but what you can do to make their day. Here are some things to apply in general to interacting with someone who is at the point of massive customer service –where there are dealing with hundreds of customers, not just you:
- Demonstrate calmness at the point of getting your issue resolved. Don’t try to rush the representative. We are all in a hurry to get resolution or even get our groceries scanned in a hurry. The representative is a person, not a robot and sometimes things may move a bit slowly.
- Be congenial. Ask the representative “how they are doing” or “how their day is going.” Try to make small talk with them and make a connection.
- Remember the representative’s name. There is a reason why customer representatives have a name tag or provide their name when you get them on the phone. Remember this during the discussion.
- Thank the representative for their time. This is one that really gets them. Be thankful to the representative for taking their time to help you with the interaction. Even if you are canceling their service – just thank them for their service. You never know if you will go back – I know lots of people how have gone back to a company that they dropped initially.
- Provide positive feedback. If you are really happy with a customer service representative’s assistance, many companies offer surveys. Ok so this will take a few extra minutes to fill out. So what? You will make the representative look good and make their day.
By spreading a bit kindness on your end, the feel good factor of any representative can increase contributing to further positive energy to those they are interacting with. Do your part to increase the happiness of these individuals and you will see how it magically ends up making your day.