Two Costly Mistakes to Avoid

Creating policies that make no sense to customers and then not listening when customers complain about them are two common mistake business leaders make. The result is often lost sales and lost customers.

The other day I was shopping with a friend in Taupo when he asked if we could go to the WINZ office so he could ask about applying for his superannuation. When we got there my friend asked the receptionist if he could leave his completed application form with her. She told him he could not because he lived in Auckland. He asked if they had a nationwide computer system and was told they did but the Taupo office would not process his application form because he lived in Auckland. Then she added, "And you'll have to make an appointment with the Auckland office to go through your application."

My friend said he did not need to meet with anyone because he had already completed the application form. "Can't I just drop it off?" he asked.

He was told he could not because WINZ policy required him to meet with someone to go through the application.  " If you don't want to have a meeting," the receptionist added, "you can apply online."

My friend replied he did not want to apply online because he had already filled out the application form. "Why would I want to fill the form out again? he asked.

"Well, it's your choice," said the receptionist. "We prefer people apply online because we want to reduce the number of people we have to meet with."

"Let me see if I understand this," said my friend. "You are telling me I have to meet with someone to go through my application but I don't want to do that because I have already filled it out. You are also telling me that if I don't want to meet with anyone, I will have to go online and fill the form out again. If I do that, I will be filling out the form by myself without assistance from WINZ staff, which is what I have already done. Finally, you would prefer I apply on line because you want to reduce the number of meetings you have with applicants. In short, you are requiring me to have a meeting you would rather not have and that I don't want or need to have. Do I have that right?"

The receptionist said that was correct and my friend told her that made no sense to him whatsoever. The receptionist said she thought their policy did make sense and added that if he wanted to complain my friend should talk to the manager and nodded towards a man who had been shuffling through some papers beside her throughout the entire conversation. Not once had the manager participated in the conversation or shown any interest in it. Once he was identified as being the manager, he had to say something. "I'm with somebody right now," he said. "If you want to talk to me about this you'll have to wait until I'm free."

This is a great example of the two mistakes - a policy that does not make sense to a customer and the organisation's unwillingness to listen to its customers.

How could the WINZ staff have handled this situation better? Firstly, when the customer said the policy did not make sense to him, the receptionist could have said, "I'm sorry to hear that. Please tell me why." After listening, the receptionist could have asked what would make sense. The manager who was listening to the conversation could have jumped in at that point and said he was interested in what the customer had to say and would like to hear more but he was with another customer right then. He could have added he would be free in a few minutes and would really like to hear what my friend had to say so would he mind waiting?

You have heard me say for years that your customers will tell you everything you need to know to succeed. You just need to listen and ask questions. But that rarely happens because we become defensive and are more concerned about proving we are right and the customer is wrong. This, of course, is a battle you cannot win. In most cases, customers just take their business elsewhere. For government handouts, WINZ is the only game in town so the staff might think they can treat their customers any way they like. But what WINZ now has as a result of their mistakes is a hostage customer who will be difficult to deal with in future and who will tell a lot of other people about his experience. I certainly would not want to be the staff member who has the meeting with my friend when he gets back to Auckland!

Do not make the same mistake. First, review you policies, looking at them from a customer's perspective. Ask yourself, "If I was the customer would this policy make sense to me?"  If the answer is. no. Ask yourself, "How would the policy have to be changed so it did make sense. Policies are made to solve or prevent our business from having a problem. Unfortunately, our solution can cause a problem for the customer. Do not fall into the trap of thinking either your problem will be solved or your customer's problem will be solved. Instead, try to find a way you can solve both problems.

Secondly, teach your staff how to respond when a customer complains about a policy or process.  The key is for them to zip their lips and open their ears. Make sure they understand their role is to gather information about what aspect of the policy the customer does not like and what they would like to see happen instead. Tell them the key to listening is to accept hat the customer is saying. Your staff do not have to understand what they are hearing, agree with it or know what to do about it but they do need to accept this is the customer's point of view.

Take the two steps and you will soon discover that a business that works for its customers is a great place to work and an even better place to own.

Three Guiding Principles

You have a choice. You can get your staff to do the right things by constantly directing what they do or you can give them some clear principles that will guide them to make the right decisions and to take the right actions. Here are three guiding principles I can recommend.

1. Make it easy.

Customers want you to make it easy for them to do business with you: Easy to find you. Easy to understand what you do. Easy to contact you. Easy to get hold of someone who can help them. Easy to get information about your products and services. Easy to make the right decision about what to buy. Easy to order and pay for your products and services. Easy to learn how to use them. Easy to get help after the sale.

Making it easy for your customers to do business with you is not just nice to do. It is at the heart of business success. As you know, business is the activity of creating value. Customers do not want products and services. They want the value they can extract from them.  Customers consider they have received value when they perceive the benefits they get from products and services outweigh the costs of obtaining them. Remember, price is only one of the costs customers pay. They also pay time, effort and emotional costs. The more difficult it is to do business with you, the more time, effort and emotional costs your customers will have to pay and the less value they will think they got.

The key to making something easy is to make it simple. Complexity leads to difficulty and is time consuming. Therefore, it discourages customers from doing business with you. I took a load of re-cycling to the tip in Taupo over the holidays and the whole process was so complicated that the next time everything is going to be hidden in rubbish bags and tossed into the landfill!

2. Do not spend money on things you customers do not value.

Do you spend time and money doing things that your customers do not value? Imagine you invoiced your customers for everything you did for them. Would they pay? Every time I fly across the Tasman I am offered a newspaper and noise-cancelling headphones and every time I turn them down. I just do not value those things. They are not useful to me because they do not solve any problems I have.

As a general rule customers value, and are therefore are happy to pay for, things that benefit them. A benefit is something that will solve a problem the customer has that bothers them or will prevent such a problem from occurring. Many ‘great’ ideas companies have for sales promotions or delighting their customers do not benefit their customers and therefore are seen as destroying value not increasing value. I was buying something for my boat the other day and saw a product that came with a free dive torch. I do not need a dive torch so I was not motivated to buy the product.

As I said earlier, business is the activity of creating value and value is defined as what customers are prepared to pay for. Do you know what your customers will happily pay for? It is worth finding out because giving them something they do not value is a waste of your time and their money.

3. Aim to make your customers successful.

Make sure your staff understand that aiming to satisfy your customers is not enough. The aim in business is to have profitable customers who stay a long time and unfortunately satisfied customers are not necessarily loyal. In fact, studies show that up to 86% of customers who defect are satisfied customers. And why would a satisfied customer defect? Because they got only what they expected to get and because that is all they got, the transaction did not leave them with a burning desire to return. On the other hand, over 20 years ago Xerox found ‘very satisfied’ customers were six times more likely to re-purchase. This is because customers are rarely very satisfied. A very recent study by Forrester Research in the USA found the customer experience provided by 61% of companies was rated by customers as being only OK, poor or very poor. Therefore, when a customer gets an experience that leaves them very satisfied, they are going to remember that company and be motivated to buy again.

A better goal is to make your customers successful. Any customer who believes you are part of their success in business or life will be loyal. To make your customers successful the first thing you have to know is what they are trying to do. Make sure your people are more than just order-takers. Teach them to find out why the customer wants a particular product or service. Tell them to first understand the problem the customer is trying to solve before giving them a solution. And make sure the customer knows how to use the product or service to get maximum value from it.

Communicate, communicate, communicate

The best way to get your staff to believe in these principles, to remember them and to follow them is to communicate them constantly. Holding group and individual meetings with staff members is a good first step but it is only a step. Ministers of the church and sports coaches understand the power of repetition. Advertising agencies also know how important it is to repeat their message. That is why we all know what you get at the Warehouse and also where you “never buy better.” But managers think it is enough to tell staff something once. Hold meetings, put signs up, and talk about them one-to-one but keep at it. Find every opportunity to weave them into the conversation. When their eyes roll back in their heads as you speak, you will know you are getting somewhere!

Are Your Suppliers Letting You Down?

 

While I was driving along the motorway recently, a truck threw up a stone that cracked my windscreen. When I got home I phoned State Insurance to lodge a claim. Much to my surprise they were great to deal with. I was able to get through to a live human being before my next birthday and she was very helpful. No unnecessary questions were asked. No obstacles were placed in my path. The woman I spoke with was friendly, polite and efficient. I even got more than I expected because I thought I would have find a windshield repairer and contact them with a claim number. But no, I was told someone from Smith & Smith would be in touch with me within four hours. In short the experience was wonderful and I was delighted.

Then the fun began.

Within three hours I had a text from Smith & Smith asking me to phone an 0800 number, push 1 then 1 and quote the registration number of my car, which they kindly listed in the text. Unfortunately it was the wrong registration number. Still, that was no big deal and I rang the number as requested.  Sure enough I got the two prompts and pushed 1 each time. Then I waited. Eventually I got a recorded message apologising for the delay and saying someone would be with me soon. They were not. After getting the "sorry for the delay" message several times, I heard the phone ringing at the other end. Great, I thought, now I am finally being connected to someone who can help me. My optimism was premature. What I got was a recorded message saying I would be put through to somebody who could help me. The phone rang again and this time it was answered by an actual person. I told her why I was calling. "OK," she said. "But they are all busy right now. I'll get somebody to phone you back."

It seemed to me I was right back where I started. I hung up, and replied to the original text saying, "You asked me to call you. I did. It was a waste of time. Would you please call me?" By the end of the day nobody had called so I called again and this time I got through and an appointment was made. I was told I would have to go to my nearest branch of Smith & Smith because the type of car I owned meant they could not come to me and replace the windscreen at my place. So, I took my car to Smith & Smith and killed two and a half hours while they did the work. When I returned to collect my car, I was told the windscreen had been replaced but it was not the correct windscreen and I would need to have another windscreen installed the following week. To make my life easier, I was told, they would come to me to do the work. I asked why I had to bring it in the first time but they could come to me the second time. There was no answer to that.

State Insurance clearly understand how important it is to provide their customers with a great experience. More importantly, they seem to understand that customers want to deal with companies that are easy to do business with, and with people who are efficient, friendly, helpful and polite. State also knows customers like to be delighted, which comes from doing something above and beyond what the customer expects. What State does not appear to realise is that all their hard work is being undone by one of their key suppliers. Consequently, my overall customer experience getting my windscreen repaired was less than average.  

Are you in the same situation? I expect you are passionate about giving your customers a great experience and work very hard to do that. Is all your hard work being undone by one of your key suppliers? Would you know if it was?

Remember when ISO 9000 was all the rage? Many companies required their suppliers gained ISO certification because it would mean they would have to demonstrate their processes were effective (they gave customers what they wanted) and efficient (there was minimal waste). ISO also requires companies to identify areas of non-performance, report them and fix them. Therefore, a customer like State could easily audit a supplier such as Smith & Smith to assess how well they are performing. Most importantly, if State found performance issues with a supplier, they could see whether the supplier was taking steps to improve their performance.

You could require your suppliers to be ISO accredited but here are six actions you can take to find out whether they are giving your customers the kind of experience you want them to have:

1. Make follow up phone calls to customers you have placed in the hands of your suppliers to find out what kind of experience they had.  

 2.  Mystery shop your suppliers.

 3.  Ask your suppliers to show you data from their customer satisfaction surveys, complaints registers or customer feedback systems. If they cannot do this, alarm bells should sound.

 4.  Ask to see their plan for managing the customer experience.

 5.  Make a site visit and talk to both management and frontline staff about what they see are their customer care issues and what they are doing to fix them.

 6. Insist your suppliers set up a Corrective Action System where things that go wrong are logged and the action taken to fix them is recorded.

In a crowded and competitive market, it is difficult enough to get and keep customers without having your suppliers undermining what you are doing.  

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Handling Unhappy Customers

For many, their worst nightmare is the thought of being faced with an unhappy or complaining customer. When that happens we feel threatened and that causes us to either fight or flee. Most of us have learned that neither of these work very well but if we knew how to turn an angry customer into a raving fan, we wouldn't be so scared. In fact, we might even look forward to the challenge!

Of course, we want unhappy customers to complain so we can put things right for them. We also want to find and fix the problem that caused the stuff up. But most importantly, we want them to tell US about their bad experience and not everyone else they meet.

The good news is it is not hard to turn unhappy customers into raving fans. You just need to treat them with a LAUGH. Of course, I'm not suggesting you laugh at them. The letters in LAUGH tell us the steps we need to follow.

L stands for: Listen and empathise

You know from your own experience that when something goes wrong you have a story to tell - and customers want to tell their story and vent their feelings. It is important we let them do that. Zip your lips, open your ears and listen to what they have to say. The key thing about listening is to accept what your customer is telling you. You might not like it. You might not understand it. You might not agree with them or you might not know why things went wrong but you must accept that what they are telling you is how they see the world. If you do not, they will stop talking to you. While they are talking, show them you understand how they feel by nodding your head, saying things like: Oh no, Gosh, that's awful, how frustrating. It is easy to do this if you put yourself in your customer's shoes.

A stands for Acknowledge the wrong and apologise

This is the most critical step and the place where most people blow it. When we hear the customer’s story we will be tempted to defend ourselves and justify why it all went wrong. But customers don’t want to hear that. They want to hear some acknowledgement they have been wronged. For example, if your partner agreed to meet you after work and showed up an hour late, you wouldn't want the first thing they say to be about what they bought on the way to meeting you. You would want to hear: "I'm very sorry I'm late. You must be fed up with waiting. I should have called.” Customers are no different. They want to hear the word, 'sorry," then an acknowledgement they have been let down or inconvenienced, and finally that you will put things right for them as soon as possible.

U stands for Understand and take ownership

One of the most powerful ways to calm an irate customer is to show you understand their problem. Ask who, what, why, where, when and how questions to show you are taking the matter seriously. But first explain why you are asking these questions by saying: "So I can understand what’s gone wrong, can I please ask you some questions." After the customer has given you the information you need repeat back they key points you have learned. This shows the customer you really do care and understand their situation.  Now what the customer wants to hear is that you will take personal responsibility for helping them get the problem sorted. They don't want to hear you are passing them on to someone else. They want to hear something like: “I’ll start sorting this out right away!”

G is for Give a solution and do something extra

At the end of the day, unhappy customers want their problem solved. They do not want excuses, explanations or justifications. They want results! Your task is to help them get a solution. It's that simple.

But just putting it right for the customer is not enough. We need to give the customer something extra to make up for the inconvenience and stress they have experienced, and the extra time and effort they had had to spend because we stuffed up. So, what should you give them? Ask them! If you ask your customer, "What would you like us to do to make up for the trouble we have caused you?" You will find they ask for less than you would have expected. That's because when things went wrong, your customer lost control and by asking them that question you are giving control back to them.

H is for Hit home with a follow up and learn from the mistake

There are two reasons why you want to follow up with your customer. First, it shows you care. Secondly, you can make sure everything has been put right to the customer’s satisfaction. You do not want the customer to still be unhappy after you have done all the hard work to put things right and you certainly do not want the customer to experience a second product or service failure and then have to call you again to tell you about it. It takes only a couple of minutes to make a phone call or send an email and it is well worth the trouble.

After you have followed up with the customer, follow up and find the root cause of the problem so you can learn from the mistake. That way you can prevent it from happening to other customers.

Don't be scared of unhappy customers. Treat them with a LAUGH and you will both be delighted with the outcome.

Listen to the Voice of the Customer

The most important lesson I have learned from being in business for 35 years is that your customers will tell you everything you need to know to succeed.

Every day our customers are giving us feedback that can help us improve. We just don't hear it. We don't capture it. We don’t learn from it and therefore we can’t use it to lift our game. Now, this is unfortunate because every year customer expectations are rising and therefore we must all be on a constant journey to find ways to do things better. 

Customers give us feedback by paying us compliments, making complaints, offering suggestions and asking questions.

Compliments are very useful feedback because they not only tell us what we are doing well, they tell us what matters to our customers. After all, we don't compliment people about things that are not important to us. So, compliments tell us what we should keep doing.

If we are lucky, customers will make complaints. I know that sounds strange but complaints really are gifts. First of all they give us a chance to put things right and turn an unhappy customer into a raving fan. But more importantly, complaints tell us where we have problems: systems that don't work, processes not being followed, policies that are not customer friendly.

We should encourage complaints because they tell us where we can improve. Now, I can hear you groan when I say that because nobody likes to deal with an unhappy customer. Perhaps they remind us of an angry parent or perhaps we take their disapproval personally. Or it just might be their aggressive behavior causes us to feel threatened. But if we learned how to handle complaining customers we might feel more comfortable being around them. As a result, we might make it easier for them to tell us what has gone wrong. This would allow us to learn from the mistake and to fix the root cause of the problem. Remember, we do want unhappy customers to tell us about their bad experience otherwise they will go out and tell everybody else.

Suggestions are even better than complaints because customers are not just telling us where we can improve, they have an idea about how we can do something better. But to take advantage of suggestions, we need to put our egos aside and accept the fact that someone who does not work in our company or department could actually have an idea worth listening to.

Even the questions customers ask are worth studying because questions tell us customers have a need that is not being met. Perhaps we hadn't even thought about customers having that need or perhaps we think we are meeting it but in either case questions tell us where we can do something better.

To take advantage of customer feedback, you need a system to capture what your customers are telling you. It could be a very simple system such as a notebook where you write down every compliment, complaint, suggestion or question you receive so that later on you can review the feedback and look for trends and recurring issues. Or it could be a more sophisticated web based system such as Tell Simon, which you can see if you go to tellsimon.co.nz or tellsimon.com.au.

But having a system to capture feedback is not enough. To benefit from what  customers are telling us, we need to have the right attitude. Let me give you an example. Because I am chairman of a small company, two hard fast talking Aussies from Melbourne came to sell me something. I had 2 two-hour meetings with them and presented their offer to my board. We decided not to buy and I sent them an email saying thanks but no thanks.

Since they were hard fast talking Aussies from Melbourne I expected they would put up a fight and sure enough, within 20 minutes I received an email back. This is what it said: “Thank you for telling us your decision. Obviously we are disappointed but we understand your situation. Was there anything about our offer that put you off? Was there anything we said or did that we could have said or done differently?”

And the last time you asked your customers these questions was?  Exactly!

But the email went on to say, “I was raised in a Greek family and taught to respect my elders and to learn from them so I assure you that any feedback you give us will be taken seriously.”

Now, I couldn’t figure out who the elder was but otherwise I thought it was a great email. So I replied saying that, in my opinion, they were very good at talking but not so great at listening. This meant we spent time on things I was not so interested in and not as much time as I would have liked on other things. I said this was not the reason we decided not to buy, but since he had asked for feedback I was telling him this.

I thought he might find this feedback difficult to handle so I expected he would launch a counter attack. Sure enough, in less than a minute, he sent back an email. It said, “Thank you for your honest appraisal, our words will ring in our ears like church bells on a Sunday morning!”

When you get compliments, complaints, suggestions and questions from your paying or internal customers do their words ring in your ears like church bells on a Sunday morning?

They should because your customers will tell you everything you know to succeed!

Sometimes You Have To Be Tough

A retailer recently sought my help because he had an employee who regularly irritated two or three customers a day. "Otherwise she is very good at her job," he told me, "but there is something about her attitude and manner that really gets up customers' noses. I'm getting tired of dealing with the almost daily complaints about her behaviour."

We reviewed the process that leads to getting staff to do the right things:

-       Does she understand the importance of providing a great customer experience?

-       Does she know how she needs to behave to create that experience?

-       Has she been told customers are complaining about her?

-       Does she understand what she is doing that causes these complaints?

-       Does she know this is a serious problem because it discourages customers from coming back and encourages them to tell others about their bad experience?

-       Does she acknowledge she needs to change her behaviour?

-       Has she agreed to change?

-       Have you provided her with coaching to help her change?

The answer to all of these questions was a resounding, yes. I asked if there was any evidence she had tried to change and the answer to that question was, no. "In that case," I told him, " You will have to start the process of dismissing her. She is too big a risk to your business to keep her around."

The retailer was shocked.  From the look on his face you would have thought I had suggested he sold his children into slavery. "We don't fire people," he said indignantly. "We are not that kind of company."  I asked if they were the kind of company who looked after their customers. "Of course we are," he replied.  I told him that in this case he couldn't be both. By choosing not to take a hard line with his employee, he was choosing to expose his customers to the very high risk they would have a bad customer experience.

I have long believed the recipe for the effective management of people is to be 50% supportive and 50% demanding. Clearly, if we are too demanding and insufficiently supportive we will create a culture of fear. That will lower morale and kill any desire to look after the customer, especially if that means doing something extra, spending money or bending a rule. On the other hand, if we are too supportive and not demanding enough, people do not give their best. They cruise and take the easy way out and it is often the customer who suffers. 

I think in New Zealand and Australia we often fall into the trap of being too supportive and not demanding enough. I see a lot of mystery shopping results and I see stores that constantly fall well below the company’s standard in spite of management’s repeated efforts to help them improve. My question to the senior managers of these companies is, ‘Why do you allow this situation to continue?’

Like my friend the retailer, we seem to be reluctant to get tough with staff and consequently fail to protect our customers from bad experiences. Sure, lots of us give an errant employee a dressing down when they do something wrong but we don’t take the action we need to take by removing the person from our customer’s world and fixing the problem once and for all. This failure to follow up the warning with concrete action just teaches the staff member they can ignore your warnings and continue to behave as they always have done.

By saying all this I have probably ignited the debate about whether you should put your staff or your customers first, and many of you will believe you should look after your staff first. But I see no conflict between the two. A customer is anyone using a product or service we produce. Since the products and services of managers are things like policies, resources, instructions and advice, the customers of managers are their staff. As we have discussed many times, one of the keys to business success is to aim to make your customers successful. So, as managers we should aim to make our staff successful. But successful at what? Successful at creating a great experience for their customers. That is why we need to be both supportive and demanding. But just as there are a few paying customers you might choose not to do business with because they are poor payers, dishonest or abusive, there are staff you should choose not to keep because they do not respond to your efforts to help them succeed in looking after your customers.

Here is another reason to deal firmly with staff who continue to create bad experiences for your customers. If you do not engage your staff, they will not look after your customers. Staff who are now engaged will quickly become disengaged if they see you allow one of their colleagues to behave in a way that is contrary to how you have been telling people they should behave. You will quickly lose credibility and respect.

This may sound harsh but you have a responsibility to your customers to remove all obstacles to them having a great experience when they do business with you. After all, they produce 100% of your profits. Obviously there is a process that needs to be followed to help staff improve their performance and, if necessary, to dismiss them. Dismissal should clearly be the last resort. But occasionally, it is an action that needs to be taken. You owe it to both your customers and the rest of your staff to be tough when the need arises.

More About Creating a Positive Personalised Experience

In a recent post,  I suggested you forget about focusing on customer service and aim instead to give your customers a positive personalised experience. Positive because customers wants to enjoy themselves. Personalised because business is a social activity between human beings. Experience because that is what your customers have when they deal with you. There are three parts to this positive personalised experience: the beginning, middle and end. To encourage your customers to return, both the beginning and the end must be strong and the middle must have substance.

The objective at the beginning is to attract the customer into the business and then keep them there. There are seven steps to creating a strong beginning starting with approaching the customer and acknowledging their presence, to greeting them, introducing yourself, welcoming them into your business and engaging them in conversation.

The middle part of the positive personalised experience is where you get down to business. The customer has come to you because they have a problem they want solved. Thus, the objective in the middle is to help the customer solve that problem. Anything short of that will make their time with you seem a waste of time. Last August, a Canadian friend of mine bought a new stove from Home Depot, a leading chain of hardware stores like Bunnings. Recently, a large burner stopped working and since the stove was under warranty, he arranged a service call. After a few phone calls, an appointment was booked. On the day, two men arrived in a van, took a look at the stove and confirmed there was a problem. They said they would report the fault and that someone would be out to fix it in a couple of weeks. If you had been the customer, would you have thought that was a good use of your time?

Delivering a middle with substance means being more than an order-taker. If the customer comes in and asks for a product or service and we give it to them, we are just taking an order. The problem with that is the customers is always right but often wrong. They are always right about the problem they have. They are often wrong about what is the best solution. After all, your customers do not know your business as well as you do. Customer are also often wrong about the problems they could have.  Again, they do not have your depth of experience.

There are six steps to creating a middle with substance.

Step 1

Aim to make the customer successful not just make a sale or complete a transaction. I once went into a furniture store and asked for a particular brand and model of bed. “What’s the concept?” the woman asked. “What are you trying to do?” Sensing I was about to experience something different, I tested her by saying she did not need to know that. She just needed to show me the bed I asked to see. “No,’ she replied. “I do need to know that because if I know what you are trying to achieve I might have a better solution.” And she did!

Step 2

Ask questions before you start showing the customer your products and services. I mystery shopped a costume jewellery store, ostensibly for a gift for my niece. I was shown lots of bracelets before I was asked whether I was looking for a necklace or a bracelet. I was looking for a necklace. A few minutes later, she asked my niece’s favourite colour. That is something else she should have find out at the beginning.

Step 3

Listen to the answers. I was mystery shopping some car dealers. The woman at reception asked me how much I wanted to spend and then went on to tell me about the cars without waiting to hear the answer.

Step 4

Show you are eager to help and have a can-do, will do attitude. Sometimes you may not be able to do what your customers ask. Do not think of reasons why you cannot do it. Think of what you can do for them. Your customers do not want to hear what you cannot do. They want to know what you can do.

Step 5

Show your customer you have the solution to their problem. If you do not have it, tell them where they can get it. Better yet, try to get it for them.

Step 6

Show your customers how to use your product or service so they can get the most value out of it.

A middle with substance leaves the customer thinking they were smart to come to see you because you took the time to understand their problem, find the solution and show them how to get the most from it. That is the kind of thinking that will bring them back.

The objective at the end is to send the customer away feeling like they want to come back. A strong ending leaves a lasting and positive impression. Here are four steps to creating a strong ending.

Step 1

Ask the customer whether they achieved what they came in to achieve. If you could not help them, tell them you are sorry you could not help them this time and ask them to come back so you can help them next time.

Step 2

Thank them for giving you the opportunity to help them.

Step 3

Invite them to come back. This would be a good time to give them a card with your name and contact details on it.

Step 4

Say goodbye. Note: Saying “Have a nice day,” or letting the customer just walk out does not create a lasting positive impression.

If all of this sounds too basic or too simple, go shopping. You will soon discover why getting the basics right is the key to success.