Turning away customers with a blame game attitude

I had the honor of hearing Karl Albrecht, co-author of Service America!, speak and I’ll never forget three things he said: "Customer satisfaction relates to attitude. Service is about feelings. However your employees feel is how your customers are going to feel…sooner or later.” What attitude do you project to your customers? Certainly our tone of voice and facial expressions have a lot to do with it—and so do the words we choose. I’ve compiled a list of what I call Red Flag words and phrases; let’s look at a few of those and the attitude they suggest:

“You should have let us know earlier if you needed it tomorrow.”

“You’ll have to get a purchase order to us if we’re to expedite this order.”

“Why didn’t you let us know about this earlier?”

You should have… You’ll have to… Why didn’t you…? You might as well shake your finger at your customers and tell them, “It’s your fault, you’re bad, bad, bad.” Often when a customer needs something right away it’s because they just found out. OR, they just realized they forgot to do something. Of course, then they’re mad at themselves. The last thing they need is us telling them they’ve messed up. A little empathy goes a long way! How about we replace the Red Flag phrases with polite phrases that show some empathy:

“I can see why you were unable to order this earlier; let’s see what we can do.”

“May I ask you to fax your purchase order to us? Our fax number is…”

“If you anticipate needing any of these supplies in the next six months, we’re happy to keep them in stock for you. Is this a good time to review a list of your potential needs?”

The customer may not always be right, yet we certainly don't need to make them wrong!

Your Dress Code: Part of your branding initiative

According to David Acker, author of Building Strong Brands, “A brand is a set of associations that provides a distinct image and the basis for a loyal relationship.” Certainly the appearance of those employees your customers and clients come into contact with has an enormous impact on that image.

In many cases, employees have little idea what to wear to project the appropriate image. In a study conducted by Marketing Professor Dennis Tootelian of California State University, Sacramento, 68% of the participants said they are uncertain about the differences among business attire, business causal and casual. And, 62% said they had felt inappropriately dressed at a business or a social function.

And, according to Robert M. Howie, Chair of the Labor and Employment Law practice group at Riddell Williams P.S., “Hostile workplace claims often start as a failure to enforce a professional dress code. [And, we must] ensure that dress codes are enforced consistently to avoid disparate treatment claims.”

Your challenge seems clear. Make sure you have a professional dress code in place; one that reflects your corporate brand and the image you want to project. And, be sure you enforce it consistently.

Four essential factors in communication

 

There are four essential factors in communication—our intent, criteria, content and process. With a situation in mind, explore each of these with me.

Our intent is our purpose—what we want to accomplish in the exchange. So often a conversation is like a pinball machine—we pull a lever and that little steel ball just ricochets off this peg and that. A good conversation is more like archery. We must take careful aim if we want to hit the mark.

I'll give you three synonyms for the second essential factor in communication: our criteria, expectations or needs. These are the relevant factors to be taken into consideration. Each of us can bring very different criteria to the same situation. Some of us want things right now, others want things to be perfect, while still others want to avoid conflict. It's important that we share our criteria with the person we're talking to.

The content is what we end up talking about. If we haven't made our intent clear and haven't shared our criteria, the content can become the battleground. There are two words that signal the discussion we're having is about to deteriorate into an argument. We call them absolutes—always and never. "You're always late." "Am not." "Are too." "Am not." "Are too." Conversation over and nothing accomplished.

The last essential factor in communication is the process—how we communicate. Albert Mehrabian in his book, Silent Messages, determined that if our message is incongruent, people will depend on what they see—our facial expressions and body language—for 55% of the message they receive; what they hear—the tone, volume, pace and pitch of our voice—for 38% of the message they receive; and our words for a mere 7% of the message people receive. These statistics refer to face-to-face conversations and IF our communication is incongruent. We want to make sure our voice and body language agree with the words that we way. We need to strive for congruent communication.

When we are careful to share our intent and criteria with others, when we think through our content and process, we are much more likely to get the results we want.

Keep Your Customers and Clients Coming Back

While researching his book, The Customer Driven Company, Richard Whitely surveyed fourteen corporations and found that 70% of the identifiable reasons customers stopped doing business with a company had to do with service lapses such as a lack of personal attention or unhelpful employees.

Another survey revealed that the average American business loses 15% of its customer base each year: 68% of these customer leave because of an attitude of indifference from a company employee. That is, the customer's perception of the employee's attitude.

Training needs to focus on helping customer-contact employees develop an awareness of how others might perceive them. Simply becoming aware of the impression we make on others can be the motivation to change. Here are seven steps you can take to lead customer-contact employees toward a service image that places satisfied customers at its heart.

1) Start by asking, "How do you want customers to perceive the people who work in our company?" In his book, Silent Messages, Albert Mehrabian cited results of his experiments: "…people's implicit behavior has more bearing than their words on communicating feelings or attitudes to others."

2) Communicate specific expectations of behavior to employees. There's no such thing as common sense!

3) Take time at staff meetings to role-play how to deal with customers on the phone. People need, in the words of Robert Waterman, "directed autonomy." They need both specific direction and the freedom to make choices that help accomplish the goal.

4) It's essential that employees be able to recognize benefits to themselves,for everyone is tuned to that radio station—WII-fm. What's in it for me?

5) Rather than saving praise and suggestions for that dreaded performance review, offer them freely and frequently. Compliment employees on their everyday achievements. Come up with ways to acknowledge them: send a thank you note or bestow a fun award at a staff meeting.

6) As employers and managers, we can serve as models of the behavior we would like to see from our employees. It's important to realize that we can't change other people, we can only change ourselves. But, by altering our actions and reactions, we can influence the response we get. By altering their actions and reactions, employees can influence the responses they get from their customers.

7) Remember to acknowledge employees' strengths. Celebrate what you already do right and then take a look at those things you can do to better manage the impression your company projects.

You can create a service image that draws customers and keeps them coming back. For, customer satisfaction is about feelings. In the words of Karl Albrecht, co-author of Service America, "However your employees feel is how your customers are going to feel, sooner or later." A satisfied customer is a loyal customer and in a service business, that's the bottom line.

Giving feedback that can be heard—and gets results

Our goal when giving feedback is to establish mutual purpose and demonstrate respect. To this end, here are six steps you can follow:

1. Start with a positive statement or point of agreement

2. Describe the current situation
• Be specific as to what the violation is—avoid general, vague terms
• Reference the employee guidelines or special directives

3. Describe the impact and consequences
• Effect the behavior has on customers/clients
• Impact on the organization with a personal hook for the employee—what’s in it for them
• Sanctions that will be applied for repeated offenses, if appropriate

4. Get them brainstorming solutions
• Help them create an action plan

5. End with a positive, future focus

6. Follow up. Give them positive feedback when they are doing things right!

Olympic athletes use visualizations and so can we!

Better than most humans, Olympic athletes—both summer and winter—use visualizations to spectacular effect. When you were watching the downhill skiing at the Vancouver Olympics, you may have noticed Lindsey Vonn and Bode Miller using visualization at the top of the run. With their eyes closed, they swayed, gently moving their shoulders and hands. They were picturing the run they were about to take—at anything but a gentle speed! Do you think they were picturing themselves falling? Of course not. So why do we?

Think of the last time you gave a speech or presentation. Did you visualize a successful result or were you picturing the disasters that could befall you: forgetting something important, developing dry mouth, having everyone tune into their pdas? Try this next time. Practice, practice, practice and while you're practicing, picture a smiling, supportive audience. Picture the room you'll be in and what you're wearing—you look terrific! Picture the audience's response when you finish—warm applause and lots of congratulations. And questions—always a sign they were interested. Visualizations can also help you calm yourself when dealing with other stressful situations. More about that in another post.

Want to get better results from your emails? Write an effective subject line!

Perhaps the most underused feature of emails is the subject line. All too often they're a one word label or worse—there's no subject line at all! In any writing, our biggest challenge is to show our potential reader—within seconds—that what they're looking at is relevant to them. Think of it like a headline in a newspaper or magazine. That's what captures our attention. Your only challenge? Make sure it doesn't look like spam! Here are some ideas to consider:

• Include your point

• Highlight actions and completion date

• Ask a question

• Emphasize a benefit

And use the subject line to save your reader time. One of the reasons we don't read is that we don't have enough time.

• Help them sort and prioritize by providing deadline information if the message is truly deadline driven.

• If you are replying—and the topic has changed or you're asking another question—change the subject line so they don't think it's one they've read. The thread remains.

• Identify FYI messages in the subject line.

• When forwarding a message, delete the FW: and change the subject heading if the original subject is not relevant to the person you are sending it to. All too often FW: is a signal that it's a joke or other waste of time.

• Finally, here's something you can set up with a co-worker to save you both time. If you're asking a quick question, thanking them for a favor or making some other brief comment, do it in the subject line followed by EOM (end of message). If they need to reply, the can do it in the subject line and neither of you even has to open the email. Of course, this only works if they know what EOM means!