Recognize Your Customers If You Want Their Trust
Several years ago I made plans to fly out and meet with a client once or twice a
week for about two months, and my office made eight weeks’ worth of advance
reservations for me at a business-oriented hotel conveniently located across the
street from the client’s office.
So I went out for my first set of client meetings and then showed up at the
hotel that evening to check-in. As the desk clerk was processing my check-in, a
manager came out and greeted me by name.
“Hello, Mr. Peppers, welcome to our hotel,” he smiled. I smiled. “Would you
mind if we took your picture?”
What? Take a picture? Why? I asked.
Because, he said, you’ve made several reservations with us for future dates,
and we'd like to put your picture up on our employee bulletin board on days you
plan to check in, so the people on duty can recognize you when you arrive.
It worked. The very next week (and for virtually every visit after that) when
I came through the door the bellman smiled and said “Hello, Mr. Peppers, welcome
back,” as he offered to help me with my bag. The desk clerk, the cashier at the
sundries store, and even the waitress at breakfast all greeted me by name. It
was an inexpensive hotel, but I don’t think I ever felt quite so royally
treated.
One of the
five
requirements for being trustable as a business is simply to “demonstrate
humanity.”
Being
human involves many things, including curiosity and intelligence, but in
customer relationships all we’re really talking about is showing empathy and
respectful familiarity to our customers, almost as if they were our personal
friends.
If you want a customer to trust you, treat the customer the way you’d like to
be treated yourself, if you were the customer. This doesn’t mean giving your
product away at a loss, nor does it mean never disagreeing with a customer. What
it does mean is asking yourself at all times whether you would consider your own
actions “fair” if you were on the other side. Is this the way a friend would
treat a friend?
The sad truth is that the overwhelming majority of businesses don't
even take the rudimentary steps necessary to recognize
and remember their customers individually. Instead, they operate on what Martha
Rogers and I call the "Goldfish
Principle," and sometimes the results are almost comically
non-personal.
But recognizing and remembering a customer is one of the most effective ways
any service business can demonstrate humanity and earn a customer’s trust, and
it really doesn’t require a high degree of technology or an overly complex set
of processes. It might involve something as simple as taking a customer’s
picture, or even
counting
license plates.
What steps can you take to help your service employees recognize customers,
and demonstrate your business's humanity?