Putting the customer back in focus

Has it happened to you too recently that you are in shop, restaurant or some other venue and you receive what I call ‘reluctant service‘? That service received from someone whose entire being clearly communicates: ‘I’d rather be at home on the couch in my pyjamas than talking to you, jackass.’

Not that there is anything wrong with being at home on the couch in your pyjamas. Throw in some good company, my favorite show and a cup of green tea and it’s my favorite place too. But if you are in a capacity where it’s your profession to provide service to other people, to customers, reluctant service just won’t do.

During my times of doing business in the Far East, I learnt a local custom the hard way – always come and go with a smile. Ignore this, and sooner or later you or your business will grind to a screeching halt.

It’s a bit like our Western equivalent of ’service with a smile’.

However, the Far East custom goes deeper than that. It represents a respect for the other person, it demonstrates the insight that as a people we are all in this together and we have to work out our differences, it shows an openness to wanting to understand one another.

It lays a basis for some form of relationship, even if it only serves the moment of there-and-then.

I have missed getting that smile a few times lately, and everything that goes with it.

When I called my cell phone company about an item overcharged on my bill, the call center agent responded to my query as if the mistake was entirely on my part. She made me feel like I was wasting her precious time. No smile there.

When I went to pay at a petrol station while on a business trip after just having filled up the car with some 40 liters – not a small purchase I might add – the cashier didn’t even look at me. She was too busy reading a magazine.

Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect that everyone should go all out for me as a customer. “Hey! Here comes Erik! Great! Roll out the red carpet!” No. I am certainly not that interesting, or to speak in the semantics of this website, ‘cool’.

But the smile and the appropriate attention is an absolute minimum to good business, to returning customers, to selling more, to mutual respect, to growth potential, to damage control, to competing and to surviving, to cool customers.

No amount of business process re-engineering, software investment or consultant dollars or Euros or Yens will EVER fix the absence of a smile in doing business.

You can spend months, years, studying the functional and technical possibilities of Oracle Siebel, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SalesForce, SAP CRM, Saas CRM or any other CRM platform and the way they would function within your IT architecture. It is wasted time if you don’t understand that the smile is a pre-condition to success.

That smile needs to be a main ingredient in all your dealings with your customer. It wouldn’t hurt if that smile permeated your entire company too.

Stating the obvious here? Well, yes. There is some of that. But look around you. Surely you have seen it too.

The world is changing. On every scale. New economies are emerging, ready to take on the world. Some of the world’s biggest companies have gone bankrupt. Power and money is shifting. Company and customer values are changing the rules of the game. The web’s exponentially growing possibilities are like curve-balls to many businesses. They struggle to keep up, they find it impossible to design sustainable business strategies in such a rapidly changing environment.

In our efforts trying to deal with all this we forget the basic ingredient.

Let’s not.

Smile.    :-)

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